on 3/16/09 5:46 PM, apostolos pantazis said: > These days it seems to be getting harder and harder finding quality > support under 32 BIT; In some cases vendors have flat out specified > that the future of support under 32 BIT is grim. Yet the enterprises > of the world are still running 32 BIT and I am wondering: what is your > experience in regards to the future of 32 BIT? These days 64 BIT > hardware seems cheap enough almost making it tempting to begin > thinking about a migration.
It depends on what you're doing. Some applications have not yet been ported to 64-bit, and may not run correctly on a machine that has a 64-bit kernel. Other applications may run better in 64-bit mode. You need to know your specific application. In our case, we're building an authentication/access management system on top of some commercial software from RSA, and there are many, many different little fiddly bits that perform different functions. They are designed so that you can run each of them on a different set of machines (and in clusters), for maximum scalability. However, one critical component has not yet been ported to 64-bit, while the vendor is telling us that certain other components are about to go away in 32-bit mode and will be 64-bit only. So, if you want to run all these components on the same platform, you are well and truly screwed. We had previously tried going all 64-bit for this application, but then ran into a problem once we were almost done, and were told by the vendor that running in 64-bit mode was not supported and they wouldn't provide any further assistance. It took us a year-and-a-half to step back from RHEL5/64-bit mode to RHEL4/32-bit mode, and then to get back to where we were before. Hardware-wise, we buy 64-bit machines, and for x86 platforms we specify AMD Opteron processors so that we have a much better memory architecture to work with, and if we need to run the systems in 32-bit mode, then we do so. We don't try to run in mixed mode, because that doesn't seem to work so well. My hope is that within a couple of years or so, we'll be able to sunset all of our 32-bit mode systems, and have exclusively 64-bit mode machines. -- Brad Knowles <[email protected]> If you like Jazz/R&B guitar, check out LinkedIn Profile: my friend bigsbytracks on YouTube at <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> http://preview.tinyurl.com/bigsbytracks _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
