[clug] Enterprise Linux use

[Paul Wayper]

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On 10/12/2010 02:32 AM, Robert Brockway wrote:
> On Mon, 11 Oct 2010, David Cottrill wrote:
> 
> You mentioned AIX... IBM will supply hardware and install Linux on it for you
> (for the right price) so they don't even need to leave their IBM confort zone :)

Indeed, a point worth mentioning here is the "OzLabs" team at IBM - here in
Canberra - working on kernel support for the Power and Cell architectures and
many other things (SaMBa, etc.).  I'm sure someone on list can fill us in more
on what those guys do :-)

>> 2. It doesn't boot from SAN. ( well it does on a p595 - thank IBM for that)
> 
> I've never tried to boot from a SAN - in all cases I've had local disks for
> the OS.  Having said that a quick Google search suggests some people have done
> it so maybe you are just experiencing a plain old bug.

And what if the SAN hardware, interface card, or fabric fail?  I can
understand this being sold as a feature, but IMO this is no better than
relying on a local disk for boot.  Sure, use a SAN for your clustered file
systems, but there are good points and bad points about every choice.

>> 3. It is less efficient than a hardware specific OS
> 
> I'll interpret this to mean 'performance efficiency'...
> 
> The developers of a portable OS can abstract away h/w specific components and
> be just as performance efficient as any other OS, in general.

It's also worth noting here that IBM recently virtualised a huge number of
their own servers - I can't find the exact statistics but from memory it was a
hundred servers into one machine.  "Efficiency" is a very hard to define thing
and there are few businesses that do the types of queries where having raw
hardware makes a difference (i.e. queries that go over several days).  And
with v12n you can set up eight eight-processor virtual hosts on a sixteen
processor physical machine and cost much less than supplying the same physical
number of processors - and for things like file serving, web serving, etc.
your performance loss will be hardly noticeable.

The rest of the questions just seem to be "but the vendor said"... which sort
of begs the Profumo Response (i.e. "well, they would, wouldn't they?").

Have fun,

Paul
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