🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <danpop.829148336@rscernix>, danpop@mail.cern.ch (Dan Pop) writes:
> In <4ke00h$7es@dfw-ixnews4.ix.netcom.com> William Taylor <wwtaylor@ix.netcom.com> writes:
> 
> >My experience has been that Sun's are generally slow. RS/6000's are very
> >fast. We had 66Mhz 601 250's with no L2 cache that outperformed P5/100's
> >(prior to EDO RAM and SB Cache). The 80Mhz 601 and 604 boxes generally
> >outperform our p5/120 Gateway's. There is no contest with the Power2
> >machines.
> 
> I couldn't find any single bit of hard data supporting your assertions.
> I can equally claim that a decent P90 box running Linux leaves an 
> RS/6000-250 in the dust in terms of interactive response time (the
> difference is considerably more impressive than the small advantage
> suggested by the SPEC numbers, which are still favouring the P90).
> Based on my own experience with these systems.  And backed by just as
> much hard data as your claim :-)
> 
> >Also, I simply _like_ the RS/6000's. For our mission critical uses, PC's
> >just were not stable enough and lacked the vendor support of the high-end
> >boxes. When the 6000's rarely broke down, they were fixed within less
> >than 24hrs. In a 24x7 shop that was VERY important.
> 
> If you're willing to pay the same amount of $$$ you're actually paying to
> IBM for this kind of hardware support, I'm willing to bet you can find
> a shop offering similar support for PC hardware.  The point is that you
> can actually save a lot of $$$ taking a different approach with the PC:
> with minimal technical skills, get a full set of spare components and
> fix it yourself, way before you will even get a call back from the
> service shop.  Without minimal technical skills, buy a spare machine,
> similarly configured to the production one.  In case of problems, swap
> the machines and send the broken one to be fixed.  This is still
> considerably cheaper (for PC hardware) than a hardware maintenance
> contract (for an RS/6000).
> 

If this would be true then why does your organization (CERN) run a 64(or so)-node
SP2 instead of a pile of Linux boxes ? Or is it your boss who doesn't listen
to your smart analysis ? 
Moreover, from my experience it is much harder to get PC stuff fixed than AIX
boxes. With an IBM contract it's "Dial IBM" and a hardware problem is fixed
within 1 day. Of course software is much harder to deal with, as we all know.
But who do you call for Linux support ? 
Commercial support might be more expensive, but on the other hand it saves me
a lot of time I can spent on my main job, which is doing physics and/or
programming (I run a bunch of 13 RS6ks for a group of scientists, in my 
"leisure time". I would refuse this job for equal amount of Linux boxes, let alone
MS junk. We have a few "also ran" Linux boxes).