I was thinking I could address the hardware costs by running on some other
hardware, maybe a big Compaq server or something?
----- Original Message -----
From: "Micah Cowan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Thursday, July 12, 2001 4:09 PM
Subject: Re: [vox-tech] Setting up a real environment
> On Thu, Jul 12, 2001 at 03:51:46PM -0500, Jay Strauss wrote:
> > I'm working at a customer, currently all the hardware from the app is
hosted
> > by Accenture (formally Andersen Consulting). They are starting the
planning
> > of bring it all back in house. Rough estimate is $1.5 million. Which
would
> > be 2 HP N-class servers (4 way (PA-RISC), 1.5 gig memory, don't know
clock
> > speed), some sort of disk cabinet (maybe a small EMC or one of HP's
AutoRaid
> > cabinets (crappy raid device if you ask me)), & various win2000 machines
and
> > software.
> >
> > Anyway, I thought I'd put together an estimate for replacing the HP/EMC
> > stuff with linux stuff, give it to the CIO as an alternative (hopefully
cost
> > saving and higher performance).
>
> Hopefully. However, the majority of costs you cite above are hardware
> costs, and I don't see how using Linux will resolve that. Choosing
> Linux over some proprietary OS to run /on/ those machines will still
> represent a savings, however; especially if you can do away with those
> win2000 servers.
>
> > 1) Is linux ready for prime time, in the regard they would be running
their
> > financial systems on it
>
> Linux has been ready for and employed in "prime time" for some time;
> provided of course we are talking a stable kernel without experimental
> features compiled in. Avoiding the use of X where possible is also a
> good idea in most cases.
>
> Regardless of how reliable the OS is, though, you /always/ want to
> plan for failure; redundancy is a must in production environments.
>
> > 2) Which distro? Not to start a religious argument!!! They'd need some
> > telephone support from a company that isn't going out of business
>
> In that case, I recommend RedHat. As a company, the appear to be
> quite stable. I'd recommend /not/ getting 7.0 or 7.1, though - find
> out how well they give phone support to 6.2. If they give good
> support, use that, and upgrade any packages which are old. If you
> decide to get a 7.0 or 7.1 and ever plan on compiling things by
> source, upgrade their gcc and glibc to stable versions. They use
> unstable development versions of both of those, and they are very
> buggy. GCC 3.0 is out now, and there's no reason not to use it.
> glibc also has newer stable versions than the ones they're using.
>
> As you can see from the above, the only real reason I'm recommending
> RedHat is because of the company support; and not because of any real
> merits of the distro itself. If you can find another distro with good
> backing, you might choose that instead. Come to think of it, SuSE
> would be a likely candidate - I haven't used it myself. I think the
> need for company support would rule out Debian or Slackware, though
> (IMO). Any SuSE users out there wanna comment?
>
> > 3) What type of equipment could/should I get, both the CPU and the disk.
>
> Don't feel qualified to answer that; especially since I don't know
> much about your specific needs.
>
> Micah
_________________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
