What Do You Look For in a Big Iron Review? 262
ValourX writes "We're starting to write more reviews of enterprise-class hardware and software and although we've done pretty well with our reviews, the high-end products are a lot trickier when it comes to testing and evaluation. Obviously it is not possible to build an enterprise-grade 'your neck is on the line' production environment just for writing reviews, but maybe we can do something smaller, just for testing purposes. What do you as an IT professional want to read in a review for a server OS or a high-speed switch, or a big iron server or proprietary workstation? What tests should we run? What results and feature comparisons are going to be most meaningful to you?"
Not Speed (Score:5, Informative)
Speed (which a lot of people put there Big Irons to the test) is really not that important of a detail. A PC with a 3 Ghz Processor will out perform a Sun Fire15k with multiple processors, for any single task. But when it starts handling load the Sun Fire will handle it better then the PC. When companies decide to buy the Big Iron they want it to be an investment that can last them at least 3-4 years preferably 4-10 years. And all they need to do is add stuff to it so that it scales with the time.
Re:Not Speed (Score:5, Insightful)
Not a bad idea, but all I see is the manufacturer lowering the maximum specs to any tests will show it 'overachieving'.
What I'd like rated is the support side. My AS/400s self detect hardware problems, phone IBM to report the problem, and a tech is dispatched. The IBM support centre phones me to tell me the system detected a problem, and that a tech is on the way. Usually the tech shows up with parts in hand inside an hour. Before the hardware has caused any downtime! I've never had a catastrophic failure on an AS/400.
Good support, redundant and hot swappable hardware, like RAM, makes for the best big iron. Low to no downtime are just as important as throuput and storage.
Re:Not Speed (Score:2)
That's not a bad thing in my book. By rating the machine slightly below what they can handle, you know that if the machine is run right at the maximum specs it will perform fine, rather than being on the edge of stability.
Re:Not Speed (Score:2)
Look closer and you'll see Marketing ratchet the specs back up to just a bit higher than the competition. After all, when's the last time anyone asked Manufacturing (or Development, for that matter) for a spec?
Re:Not Speed (Score:2)
Fine, then it'll be too expensive for it's performance point, or the price will be dropped too. In the first case, the manufacturer loses out, in the second case you gain. Doesn't worry me!
"WebServer"? (Score:2)
Do they even use "Big Iron" for web servers? Very much? Aren't they all mostly SPARCs or Vanila Intel? File serving and number crunching would be the standard "Big Iron" useage, right?
Re:"WebServer"? (Score:3, Insightful)
VMS is nearly as good; some argue it's better.
Re:Not Speed (Score:3, Insightful)
For Load They should max out the system slightly above the recommended specs and see how well it handles it.
Nah, push it until it falls over and see how it degrades. Stick a line on the graph where the rated capacity is.
Stupid question (Score:2)
Wouldn't this to a much larger degree depend on the software rather than a hardware ?
Re:Stupid question (Score:2)
Assuming that's the case, trying to separate a software review from a hardware review would be a bit like separating a review of Apple computers from a review of their OS.
Re:Stupid question (Score:2)
All this performance testing is a very tricky business. Easy money though
Reliability (Score:4, Insightful)
Try to install faulty components, see what happens (Experience: even if the manufacturer claims failure tolerance, this is seldom the case).
Check if the iron really runs in the manufacturer's reported maximum temperature and what happens at the temperature plus couple degrees (Experience: Sun boxes keep running, HP/UX boxes immediately shut down).
Check if the system runs itself down gracefully when UPS reports power is out. Cut power entirely, see what happens.
Check if you can administer everything without touching the iron, including shutting the box down and starting it (Lights Out Management).
Re:Not Speed (Score:3, Insightful)
- How well does the system react to overheating?
- How well does the system react to unexpected shutdown?
- How well does the system react in general?
While big iron often goes into controlled environments (generators, air conditioners, etc.), those systems sometimes fails. Whether their failure causes an inconvenience or a catastrophic problem is a significant question.
For example- does the system detect the h
Re:Not Speed (Score:2)
IT professional want to read in a review for a server OS or a high-speed switch, or a big iron server or proprietary
A server OS doesn't have much to do with the hardware but it has a lot of do about handling requests. Also If you have a 1 CPU 3 Ghz system vs. 3 CPU 1 Ghz System. In most cases the 3/1 Ghz system will handel the load better then the one with the faster chip because information on the 3 CPU can be processed at the same time. (Yes I know there are not many 3 CPU systems th
Re:Not Speed (Score:4, Informative)
Or rather maybe the problem is that it's actually not that black and white a problem. It depends on what you are running for software.
If you're running a single processor intensive app that isn't threaded, the faster single processor machine will win out, hands down.
If you're running multiple apps, and/or apps that are threaded properly, than the multiproc should be able to at _least_ keep up with single proc machine.
I develop on a 2x800mhz PIII I've had now for over 3 years. The computers we've been buying recently for new guys are P4 ~3ghz. We also have older quad rack mount web servers we use for our external sites, and newer internal single proc machines running much faster single procs. Hands down, without a doubt, in this application the multiproc machines _kill_ the newer ones when under load.
Re:Not Speed (Score:3, Interesting)
Not so fast.If I am running 3 processes that don't need to communicate, the single CPU system will keep thrashing the cache while the 3 processor system won't.
That's why a big iron system may feel ponderous even if you're the only user online, but with 1000 users, it feels no slower while your disktop feels snappy and responsive but 5 people logging on with you can bring it to it's knees.
Re:Not Speed (Score:2)
2^(log(6)/log(2))=6
Re:Not Speed (Score:3, Insightful)
If you have 100 servers you pay 5 servers/year in maintenance money.
If you just buy new servers and junk the failed ones, you can afford a 5% yearly failure rate (or even higher, if you sell the failed servers for parts). Plus you constantly keep upgrading without keeping outdated CPUs...
Most important feature (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Most important feature (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Most important feature (Score:4, Insightful)
slashdot load test
Mostly... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Mostly... (Score:5, Funny)
I just love that this has been moderated as "Insightful".
Re:Mostly... (Score:2, Insightful)
No shit?
Not to drag this even further OT than it already is, but I already knew that. However, when moderating, you should moderate what you think the thing is. If it's funny, moderate it funny. If it's off topic, moderate it off topic. You shouldn't be moderating just to add karma to a poster.
If you are that worried about somebody else's Karma, you obviously don't have enough to do. Try to turn the computer off once in a while and maybe take a nice walk in the woods.
What kind of action? (Score:3, Funny)
Coffee spilt in one of the CPU PSUs.
Coffee spilt on the keyboard (if present).
Coffee spilt in one of the disk system PSUs.
Swapping two of the disks in an pack...
More seriously, it would be handy to know the ratio of workload handled to watts consumed. Workload:cooling required would also be handy.
Phil
Re:What kind of action? (Score:5, Funny)
1) How many men and what type of equipment are needed to move this for the next lan party.
2) HL2 and Doom 3 benchmarks.
3) Case nods. Do any come with lights and lighted fans? If the 19" rack is not entirely filled, you could put a REAL AQUARIUM in there (but this makes it harder to move for LAN parties.
4) Most big iron does not have much in the way of quality sound, so you should test this out.
5) Does the 19" rack come with handles for easy portability to/from the lan parties.
6) Heat production. Should the host of the lan party install additional air conditioning capacity?
7) How expandable are the graphics? Some blades do not have room for a full-size graphics card.
Re:What kind of action? (Score:2)
For the uniformed: Click [reference.com].
By the way, you are a moron.
Re:Mostly... (Score:2)
Re:Mostly... (Score:2)
Real numbers (Score:2, Insightful)
I would like to see what they get in a regular user's hands.
Phil
Here are a few useful tests: (Score:5, Funny)
Bossman Compatibility: Verifies that the hardware vendor has taken my boss's boss out to dinner and purchased suitably expensive drinks. Rating based on the number of stars the restaurant recieved, although points may be docked if the filet mignon was a little overdone. This one is related to the...
CYA Verification: Vendor must have a name recognizable to people who read periodicals such as "CTO Magazine" so, when it breaks down, I can say "who ever hear of XVY Company's gear being bad?" If the vendor is a company like Dell which also sells home PCs, this metric should also include going to my boss's boss's house and verifying that his Dell is running okay so I don't have to hear shit like "I don't know why we got Dell, my desktop at home has problems all the time, too, and it's only six years old!"
Sweetness Factor: Not as much of a factor as it once was, depending on how big of iron we're talking about. But it the thing has, say, requires a cooling tower that happens to have a waterfall built into it, that's point right there. May conflict with....
The Under-Desk Operation Profile: Since it'd take at least a month and a dozen SRs and books of useless paperwork just to get the beastie screwed into a rack at our NOC, the server must both fit nicely under the desk in my cube with all the other machines and not be too loud. Generation of excess heat is a plus since the facilities people have set 61 degrees as a reasonable temperature for my office in the winter.
Extra-App Capacity Testing: For when some moron in another department comes in and convinces my boss's boss that "all that server is doing is running the backend for our entire operation, so can we put our incredibly messy half-working app on it too and treat it like QA?" If this server can alert a Terminator unit to go to the aforementioned coworker's home in the middle of the night and slay him and his family, this requirement can be waived (oh, I wait for the day this will be waived....)
I'm sure there are a few other benchmarks you could run, but honestly these are the Big Five that I decide on.
Re:Here are a few useful tests: (Score:2)
Re: Enterprise-Class Hardware (Score:3, Funny)
big iron? (Score:5, Funny)
Cash (Score:2, Funny)
Alternatively... (Score:2)
Re:big iron? (Score:2)
IBM (Score:3, Funny)
Cheers,
Matt
Fool-proof uptime (Score:3, Informative)
Vendor-Specifics (Score:5, Interesting)
Basically, none of these purchases happen in a vacuum. The merits of the technology matter, but "playing nice" is a dealbreaker. If this causes ANYTHING to break, forget it for now. et cetera.
Load Test (Score:3, Insightful)
Copy Protection in software? (Score:2)
Re:Copy Protection in software? (Score:2)
Doesn't happen. Aside from asinine license keys tied to the MAC address of a system, I've never seen any stupid copy protection schemes anywhere except at the consumer/small business level."
In the same line you said that copy protection doesn't exist in enterprise software and then described an asinine license key scheme tied to MAC addresses in enterprise software. This kind of thing is exactly what we want to know about.
Who paid for it (Score:5, Insightful)
Who asked for it and more importantly did anyone pay for it either directly or indirectly.
True costs (Score:5, Interesting)
Just my $.02... oh, also just plain reviews of support companies on different hardware would be good also.
Cost Analysis (Score:2, Insightful)
If the cost of this "new" server is 5X more expensive (as a package) than another system that gives you the same functionality and comparable performance then knowing that this alternative exists and what the performance / price difference is would be valuable.
Scaling claims & Installation complexity (Score:5, Interesting)
Second, install the application yourself. Don't let the vendor do it for you. And when you install it, install it as an enterprise would. That is, if it's an n-tier application, or has multiple components, don't take the "default" installation and put all of the components on one system. Of course this will work. Try distributing the components over multiple systems like an enterprise would. Often this is where the complexity comes in and products falter.
One company I worked for purchased some software from Tivoli. After 6 months, and a team of engineers onsite from the vendor, they still couldn't get the components to talk for more than a day without problems (after weeks of installation), and still couldn't get useful data out of the database due to its size, so we took our $500mil back and bought something else. Having an evaluation that would've tested this would've saved us a bundle.
Re:Scaling claims & Installation complexity (Score:2)
This reminds me of another thing that should be checked, I remember from my RAID card days that if you dealt with small files like text documents all the time, and had cache on the controller you could see significant speed increases and at the same time, using cache for something like CAD drawings was just sill because each file would fill the cache and make everything feel slower, so maybe an extended test of large and small file would be inorder also, because what works for a documentation company will p
Please email me (Score:2)
Environmental Factors (Score:2, Interesting)
From a Network Admin perspective... (Score:5, Interesting)
How easy is it to install? How easy is it upgrade? How easy is it, if its a different architecture (ie, Windows, Linux, Mac), to migrate big programs (Exchange, databases) from one to another? How well does it gel with existing servers? Do they recognize one another? Do they acknowledge? Can they fit into existing Active Directory-type listings effectively?
Most to all shops are not created overnight. They are built on mistakes or tried-and-true methods that are (usually) quickly outdated. The problems arise when you try to "fix" the existing problems by bringing in more robust OS's and capabilities. It is the meshing of these that is more important to Network Admins that tales of how well this server did on a single machine in a non-network environment.
** High-speed switch
Does it scale (how easy is it add one to five or more on a single chain?)? How is the admin interface? Is it web-based? Console (ie, serial port) based? Does it have both in case console is all that's available? Can you break it or overrun it with traffic?
** Big iron server or proprietary workstation?
Someone else has mentioned scale so let me throw in something different: How easy is it to recover? Does it have Raid? (Well, it should obviously) Break it, remove a disk and see if you can recover from it easily. "Lose" a driver and see how quickly you can recover.
Something I'd love to see is a review that includes a call to the tech support of that server. Don't tell them you're a reviewer, just tell them you got a problem. See how quick they respond, how informative they may be, how far does it have to go before they call in reinforcements? (ie, higher level support)? Will they call on-site repair? If so, how long did you have to troubleshoot before they determined it? Sometimes a card or piece will break and front line support will make you bleed through their ignorant manuals step-by-step when its clear that Piece A is broken and need a on-site tech with experience with that hardware to come and replace it.
** What tests should we run?
Stress, along with installing/upgrading hardware.
** What results and feature comparisons are going to be most meaningful to you?
I believe that over the course of this comment writing and thinking back over my dealings on big iron hardware, that comparisons in regards to tech support, informativeness, and responsiveness are something that can immediatley be added to the review process.
Something more long-term would be how long did the server run before downtime, problems, burnouts, or hardware failures.
Re:From a Network Admin perspective... (Score:2)
You aren't even in the ballpark here.
-- "Installing OS" as a criteria? Um.. As you will see, this is almost the LEAST of the issues. Anyway, all enterprise class OSs have "kickstart" or "jumpstart" installation (and usually dedicate two servers to the task). Try installing on 2000 servers sometime...
The issue may be "RHEL 3 vs Solaris 10", and that one is based on things like vertical stacking.
"High speed switch" -- WTF? Are you dealing with big iron, or a small cluster. Big iron means big bo
please include: (Score:5, Funny)
+ Gentoo compile time
+ Overclocking possibilities
+ Case mods, preferably with blue neon lights
Re:please include: (Score:2)
Large SMP systems (Score:3, Informative)
Large scale SMP systems require a slightly different mentallity than PC systems, as anyone who has managed a P690 or E10k will attest. You expect performance, you expect reliablity, you expect service, and for what you pay you better get it!
Trust in the vendor is our #1 concern. (Score:3, Insightful)
Nothing is more annoying than if you buy a big frame and then you find out that a silly little piece of software is no longer maintained. Or like HP announced today, that they are once again changing their HP-UX roadmap and once again proved that they can't be taken seriously if they predict anything further out than 3 months.
It all comes down to the simple fact that in the end, almost all of the big boxes are the same to the application. Sure, some have hard and some softpartitioning. Sure, you have different cpus, memory latencies and whatever - to the app it is just a bunch of system calls. But in the end, if you can't run your app on it, its useless, no matter how fast, redundant or whatever it is. We have completely moved away from selecting the box by its hardware properties. They are all sufficiently redundant and whatever. We go purely by how well the software we need to run is supported on the OS and if they have a roadmap that can be trusted.
Peter.
Re:Trust in the vendor is our #1 concern. (Score:2)
Or like HP announced today, that they are once again changing their HP-UX roadmap and once again proved that they can't be taken seriously if they predict anything further out than 3 months.
Bad Carly! No bonus.
Service. (Score:2)
The rest of it is not all that important, really.
Re:Service. (Score:2)
How inane. EG. MasterCard in Australia was (probably still is). using 2 E10K for M/C transactions.
How do you break it? Remove a power supply? Sledgehammer the cabinet? Ok, blow one of them up... its fine.
Oh -- you probably meant software. Been architected, tested, before deployment, run on another server (this one in the US). M/C wants warantees. THEN its deployed. Mere mortals will not TOUCH the production box, which is fully N+1.
If it breaks, we are talking MILLIONS of dollars
One possible test... (Score:2)
sorry to be blunt, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is going to be harsh, but you need to hear it.
Obviously it is not possible to build an enterprise-grade 'your neck is on the line' production environment just for writing reviews
In order for the review to be accurate, that's how it has to be tested. Evaluating enterprise equipment in a non-enterprise environment with people who have no enterprise experience is pretty much worthless...and you're not going to fool anyone.
There's also no market for this sort of thing. Equipment on that level is bought because of high level executive briefings, price negotiations, migration options, and politics. Why? Because the market is so cutthroat and all the features that matter are there. The decisions are not made on whether or not a power cord was included, it was easy to unpack, the manuals were clear, how well built it looks, and how it did on SysMark SuperServerSimulator 2005...which is about the only thing all you 2-guys-with-a-webserver "hardware review" sites know how to do.
Further- often when a hardware vendor wants to get a contract, they provide a unit for evaluation.
On top of that, the major analyst firms already fill what little niche there is, and they have really big names 90% of the important people with Nice Shoes will recognize, which means even if that analyst is wrong, the decision to go with their recommendation is justifiable and won't get the Nice Shoes person fired. You'd be lucky if .01% recognized your name, much less trusted it. "Jones! Why does our website keep crashing?" "Well, we're having a lot of hardware problems." "Why did we go with ABC for our servers?" "Oh, XYZhardware.com said they were the best." "Jones, clean out your desk."
So...sorry, there's no market for what you're trying to do, and you don't have the means to do it.
Re:sorry to be blunt, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree with the above post for all the reasons he mentioned. You don't drop $1M on a product because it got "5 thumbs up" in some magazine.
However, to offer some constructive criticism--what you could do is do extensive technical and performance analysis of a working system in a production environment. Instead of being able to sit at your desk and run pretty little tests, you would have to interview customers of a product, and ask them:
Does the company support linux on it (Score:2, Insightful)
to big dog servers and I just bought two more today.
1. Does the hardware vendor support linux or just pay lip service to it.
2. Can I get it without a os loaded or can I get it
preloaded. If it so much as comes with a oem windows
cd in the box I will ship it back.
3. Have they pissed off the community lately.
I just bought over 40k in servers today and guess who did not see a penny of that? DELL
Re:Does the company support linux on it (Score:2)
If you don't mind: OK, it wasn't Dell, then who was it?
Reliability (Score:2)
Re:Reliability (Score:2)
So, as a result, I like to see, hot-swappable everything.
So run a cluster of servers behind a load balancer. If one server craps out, swap it out.
Big Iron - Devaluing the Brand (Score:5, Interesting)
In particular, big IBM mainframes (s/3x0) running something like MVS (maybe VM at a push).
Anyone else think the term "Big Iron" is used innapropriately to describe a bunch of piddling little boxes that don't even need an air-conditioned datacenter equipped with an automatic Halon fire extinguishing system?
Re:Big Iron - Devaluing the Brand (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Big Iron - Devaluing the Brand (Score:2)
Re:Big Iron - Devaluing the Brand (Score:2, Insightful)
My domicile is therefore "big iron" according to your definition.
Maybe I'll set up a time-sharing bureau.
Re:Big Iron - Devaluing the Brand (Score:5, Insightful)
Once you work for an organisation that has had an IT department longer than the mid-1990s (say, a bank where it goes back 40+ years), you'll realise this article about "Big Iron" is a joke.
Where I work, we have several designations for breaking down inventory. Destkop/Wintel (including stand-alone WinOS servers), Mid-Range (Unix, cluster windows, linux), and Transactional ("Big Iron").
E15ks are big, powerful, and excellent enterprise servers. But...even then they're just servers. Their workload is managed differently (e.g. no batch) and their failure/recovery modes are completely different.
Aside from DEC, I mean Compaq, I mean HP Tandems, MVS (Z/OS, aka OS/390) would be the only thing we consider "Big Iron". Calling an E10k "Big Iron" is equivalent to noob-speak in senior IT corporate circles. If we had Crays, that would be in scope of this definition too.
Re:Big Iron - Devaluing the Brand (Score:2)
Real Big Iron has neon lamps.
Also, any serious mainframe would need at least 16 rows of 32 lamps for the 'general registers' and a ton of others for for various ancilliary registers, floating point regs, channel interfaces, status indication etc.
And most importantly, a "LAMP TEST" button to turn them all on at once!
Re:Big Iron - Devaluing the Brand (Score:5, Interesting)
For extra points, the Lamp Test switch should be located at elbow level, so you can nudge it while walking through with the regional manager.
LEDs are fine, but they can't be blue. Anything with blue LEDs is probably still in diapers.
Seriously, failure isolation is a big thing. The best test would be to get a bunch of failed boards from the factory and install them in various combinations, to see if the system can puzzle it out. The manufacturer isn't likely to assist you with this test, however.
How does it handle spares? Are important parts protected 1+1 or n+1? How long can it operate with a fan unit removed for replacement? Do the air filter trays like to come unlatched and snag cabinet doors as they close?
Also, since my definition of "big iron" means "equipment which justifies employment of a Floor Space Planner", let's talk about cabinets and connections. Some of the better gear I've worked on uses fiber links between pieces, letting you locate them on different floors of a building if that suits you. And since all the links are redundant, you can move and replace link cables without taking a hit.
That same equipment, by the way, had a slight bug in the interface. If one sent too many commands over an administrative link in a short period of time, it would reboot. Oops. There's supposed to be a graceful rejection process when the buffer's full, and they must've forgotten to QA that part. (As far as I know, the bug is still in current versions of the software, because nobody runs up against it but me.)
RAS (Score:2)
So they claim it, but does it work?
Reliabilty: The quality or state of being reliable
Is the system built using good design methodologies, and practices?
Quality components?
Availability: The quality or state of being available
Does the system have many single points of failure?
Are those points truly supseptible?
Servicability: The quality or state of being serviceable
Can I change broken parts w
Re:RAS (Score:2)
Maybe some of the plug-compatible mainframe manufacturers used it too (Amdahl/Fujitsu/Hitachi)?
Anyway - RAS is still a good concept, but hard to measure without years-worth of in-the-field data.
Reviews are insignificant in this setting. (Score:3, Insightful)
1. Requirements solicitation - figure out what needs we need to fill, be it wifi net access, a file server, etc
2. Vendor research - contact the usual suspects in the field (networking, big iron servers, etc) and arrange for consultation and formal bids to be made. NOTE: this step is skipped ENTIRELY if the company/institution already has a corporate account with a vendor that provides the appropriate services that you require.
3. Formal bidding process - pit the vendors against eachother, it's fun when you get them onsite to demo their gear. Generally vendors will lower prices to sweeten their bid.
4. Award the contract to one of the vendors, or (more likely) have funding denied to you by the beancounters and end up doing a half-assed implementation of what any of the vendors was going to do.
Individual machine or software reviews are a *tiny* part of the process for securing enterprise level hardware/software services.
Reliability and system availability (Score:2)
Lots of details matter (Score:4, Funny)
a. Are there multiple fans or fan trays?
b. Are there multiple power supplies?
i. How many are needed to power the system?
ii. Can they be powered on and off individually?
b. Are there multiple CPUs?
i. Can they fail independantly, without outage?
ii. Can they be partitioned or dedicated?
c. How about multiple storage controllers?
2. How maintainable is it?
a. Hot-swapability
i. CPUs?
ii. Fans?
iii. Power supplies?
b. Manufacturer longevity
c. Product line stability
d. Off-the-shelf parts?
3. Physical specs
a. It's gotta be rack-mountable, right?
b. How many U high?
c. How deep?
d. Are there pluggy bits on the front, back, both?
e. How much does it weigh?
f. How bloody annoying are the rack rails?
g. Can you open and close it with things mounted directly above and below?
h. Can you swap out any and all parts without unracking?
i. How much heat does it generate?
j. How much power does it require?
k. Is there a maximum rack density specified?
l. Is it loud enough for OSHA to require ear plugs?
4. Expandability
a. How many net ports minimum/maximum?
b. What kind of net ports can it have?
c. How many storage thingies (hard drives, etc)?
d. Is there an upgrade path for the CPU(s)?
5. Servicability?
a. Is there a "lights out" managment board available?
b. Does it require dedicated management software?
c. Does it support SNMP?
i. Standard MIBs?
ii. Custom MIB(s)?
iii. Can it send traps?
d. Are you forced to connect a monitor/keyboard?
e. Is it supported by the obnoxious management/monitoring software of my choice?
F. Miscellaneous
a. Can it run Linux?
b. Does it force me to run Microsoft software?
c. Ok then, what the hell O/S does it run?
d. Can I have the source?
e. Please?
f. There's no SCO crap in there, right?
g. If I fill a whole rack with them, will it impress the chicks?
h. Ok, then how do I impress chicks?
i. What the hell's a chick, anyway?
I'm sure I've left out a ton of stuff, but those are some quick thoughts.
Re:Lots of details matter (Score:2)
That's for the courts to decide. M$ and Sun have already paid, so you can leave them out of the equasion.
DDOS it... see how it holds up... (Score:2)
-----
Blaster was a worm, and of worms in general I would say that there is little new to be learned from them. They simply exploit holes that haven't been patched in vulnerable software from Microsoft. The security community continues to lambaste Microsoft regarding their alleged push toward making security their #1 priority, which actually comes in second plac
Re:DDOS it... see how it holds up... (Score:2)
his usually wouldn't be a problem for the router, except for each packet was destined for a unique IP address. What started happening is that each route was looked up, routed, and stored in its cache for future packets - only there weren't any future packets. What happened next was the memory space allocated for caching CEF routes filled up, and once full, the router simply purged its cache so that every packet had to then go to the CPU to be routed. Once this happened, all hell broke loose.
One solution:
Re:DDOS it... see how it holds up... (Score:2)
FMEA (Score:3, Informative)
Support (read: people) (Score:2)
Testing the support system simulates the "your neck is on the line" environment without much infrastructure cost expenditure. It is definitely very valuable information for those trying to narrow down the field. I know I wouldn't consider
how easy is it to buy (Score:2)
* Are the prices openly availiable
* If not, can I get them via email, phone, fax?
* How many phone calls to a sales guy does it take to get a price list.
* You mean he wants to fly out to discuss pricing?
* How much cheaper is my buddy at SavvyCorp able to buy it for since he knows the right guy to haggle with.
I'm not sure you can.... (Score:2)
What I mean is, when I have home stuff or testing equipment or generally anything that's "for play", my requirements are erratic, and usually any single requirement can be overcome if the product has a certain "coolness" factor. But that's not what you're
Render power and floating point math. (Score:2)
Big Iron Review (Score:2)
These are just a few things I a
Test router & switches like LightReading does (Score:2)
Ominous noises and blinking lights a plus (Score:2)
Make good on the crucial factors... (Score:2)
When it comes to enterprise class computing, these are the crucial factors:
I don't look for reviews, period. (Score:2, Insightful)
Vendors will bend over backwards to get you to buy their big-ticket items. They will generally give you test machines and allow your engineers to hammer away. Those making the purchasing decisions will talk to their engineers, and value their opinions much higher than those of a magazine.
At least thats how it sh
Quake 3 frame rates (Score:2)
Useful articles describing IT hardware practices (Score:2)
Error/Failure Recovery relating to... (Score:2)
One of the biggest reasons companies even think of spending lots of money on High-end hardware is because of the capabilities during error/failure states. For instance, on the IBM Regata, you can lose processors, memory sticks, bus paths, etc, and it has "self" healing technology by which the system stays up. This is a high dollar item for P-series though, it is possible to take advantage of some of this in their non-RS6000 line pSeries stuff as well.
Compaq Non-stop has similar t
Just how far from reality (Score:2, Insightful)
Product cross comparison of specifications using iedntical test suite rather than manufacturers 'tuned' suites.
Real world test comparison. How well does the box do it's job when it's doing everything it will do in deployment at once.
Clear breakdown of cost so that all the 'gotchas' like proprietary cards or code that is not included, warranty, spare parts turnaround, ease of diagnosis, actual electric consumption, etc.
It's easy (Score:3, Funny)
To capture the essence of the enterprise, you need to hire four newly graduated students and have them write the worst program possible in Java. Don't worry, the "worst" part comes automatically. Then, apply this program to several brands of servers and see which one actually survives. That is the one you recommend in the review.
Host /. on it and measure marketoid sweat (Score:2, Insightful)
The Ultimate Test (Score:3, Interesting)
No, no...you gotta mix it up like this... (Score:2, Funny)