> -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:sunray-users- > [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Dave McGuire > Sent: Wednesday, June 21, 2006 12:39 AM > To: SunRay-Users mailing list > Subject: Re: [SunRay-Users] Why SunRay? > > Yes, but I tend to ignore cost and pursue uptime. :)
Managers want both. They don't get it. When we tell them how much the five 9's is going to cost them, they tend to only want to pay for one 9 and one 8 :) > That sounds like a reasonable plan. I have less faith in vendor > support, though, to be honest. I spent a good bit of time in the early > 1990s telling Sun engineers things they didn't know about their own > products. (no offense intended to the Sun guys here) I hear you, and I've been there too...But I've generally worked at sites that got a fair amount of attention. The sad part is, if we were supposedly getting the best of the best, the best wasn't good enough in many cases. Only recently has Sun seemed willing to let their best and brightest out to visit with customers. Of course with so many lay offs, maybe that's all they have left to put in front of the customer? > The > third was on a roll-around cart which could be taken anywhere in the > room if an admin felt the need to be physically close to the machine > while working on it. That scheme worked very well for us. Those are called Crash Carts. I've built many of them. Usually they were Sparc workstations that could also be used to Jumpstart a system if need be. (Network Jumpstart servers weren't always available due to networking/security segmentation requirements). > > As complexity has increased, reliability has increased as well. > > Well I absolutely cannot agree with that part... It's of course not true in 100% of the cases, but statistically, it's true. The MTBF of today's more complex systems is higher than yesterday's simple systems. > Sitting ten feet from > me are two DEC RK05 hard drives which were built in 1972 and still work > great. (hobby restoration stuff)...while sitting here on my desk are > about twelve IDE drives, from 120GB to 250GB, all dead. "Cost > engineering" and suitly profit-centric customer-satisfaction-be-damned > behavior has hurt reliability to the point where I don't trust any > consumer-grade hardware anymore, and even the "biggies" like Sun and HP > are using consumer-grade components in their otherwise-enterprise-grade > systems these days. The market has demanded it. Why build and pay the expenses for a server that will last 15 years when it's useful life is really only 3-5 years? I remember spending hours packing up old hard drives and sending them back for replacement under the manufacturer's 5 year warranties. Now I've got 1 year warranties in my desk top hard drives and I've never had to send one back yet. In many cases I'm on my 3rd year of my 1 year warranted hard drive. I have never had a cheap IDE hard drive fail on me. Knock on simulated wood. > I think we'll just have to agree to disagree there, as anyone > interviewing with me would be shown the door if he/she asked about > putting big color monitors in the machine room! ;) No one ever said put color monitor heads on the servers. But a console bank of workstations where a tech can telnet to a term server/ALOM/RSC in one window, and a web browser in another window to work an issue via Sunsolve is certainly a useful thing. We had a complete unplanned power outage a couple years ago, and we could have used even more of them. Very handy when you have to bring a data center back up unexpectedly. _______________________________________________ SunRay-Users mailing list [email protected] http://www.filibeto.org/mailman/listinfo/sunray-users
