On Mon, 14 Sep 2009, [email protected] wrote: > On Mon, 14 Sep 2009, Charles Hutchinson wrote: >> I'm not sure anyone is running vmware on "Big Iron" servers. It does not >> run on mainframes and mini's. It runs on commodity Intel/AMD servers. It >> happens that these "commodity" servers are getting larger but that has been >> the case throughout the history of in PC. I run 6GB of ram on my personal >> computer at home and make use of that ram on a regular basis as well as the >> 4 cores in the box. 5 years ago the same computing horsepower was almost >> exclusively in datacenter environments and more than likely would have fit >> what I perceive as your definition of Big Iron. > > the original poster was calling the 128G 8-core systems 'big iron'
What i'm trying to express is that we had a problem with effectively utilizing 2-core 4GB boxes, and moore's law has seemed to outpace our ability to use the hardware, so we're buying 8-core 32GB-128GB servers and running software on it which needs about as many cpus to run as they did back in 2003. Where we used to have <10% utilization of a cpu on a dual core server, we now have <10% utilization of a cpu on an 8-core server. And also by "Big Iron" i'm referring to the way that with virtualization we seem to be going back to smaller numbers of boxes running more things, where individual failures of boxes is at least more 'disconcerting' and the load profiles tend to be less predictable -- which tends to lead to redundant networking, some kind of shared storage with lots of pricier spindles, etc. So, the 1U/2U boxes have become less "commodity" in terms of what they're hooked up to, even though they're still the "commodity" price point. And in contrast, where we had been it was easy to argue that 1U boxes with single GigE drops and a single SATA spindle and non-redundant power supplies fulfilled the needs of the enterprise because the http load balancers produced "redundant arrays of inexpensive servers" which is the overall concept that i'm thinking of as being "commodity" (a very 'strong' version of commodity in not even bothering to use RAID in servers). And I'm being intentionally ironic in the way that i'm using the term 'Big Iron' to describe the way that I'm seeing vitualization. I probably should have explained that better, but I was rambling while jetlagged... _______________________________________________ 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/
