We currently use a V440 as a Sunray server. There is a population of
maybe 50 potential users, but there is rarely more than a dozen logged
in and half that many active. The active ones are running thunderbird
and firefox, and occasionally Matlab and various development tools.
Firefox can easily soak a lot of cycles.
The system is perceived as slow for two reasons. First, there are times
that there are too many users. We can solve that by putting a second
V440 we have in a rotary.
Second, even if you are the only user on the system its simply not as
fast as a modern X86 workstation. As far as I know none of the Sparcs
are really that much faster than the V440 for single threads. Maybe the
Sparc servers with higher cpu counts and cores can handle more users and
give more throughput, but I'm skeptical that single desktop app's seem
much faster than on the V440.
So is there a Sunray server that would give faster desktop performance?
Would an AMD/Intel server give faster Sunray desktops? Even if it did
there are issues because of software support. The Linux support is
disappointing. No NSCMS and rather old enterprise editions that are not
desktop rich. Solaris X86 on the other hand doesn't have vendor support
for Matlab and similar packages.
So its not very clear to me what server hardware would be perceived as a
real upgrade.
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