What Do You Look For in a Big Iron Review?

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

[jellomizer]

Well the 2 main issues with Big Iron Equipment is How Well it handles Load and Scalability. For Load They should max out the system slightly above the recommended specs and see how well it handles it. Most people don't care for overall benchmark but more issues that affect the user. Say it was a WebServer We don't care how many pages/second it can handle but how well we get the webpages when the system is maxed out. Do we have to wait 5 minutes and the page just pops in. Or do we wait 5 Minutes for a page to load but we see the results of it coming in. When working above the required load how much does the system heat up (causing possible failures in the future). Secondly is how well can it scale, Can Extra Processors be added on, Can you add/hotswap processors on the system. What is the Max Ram it can hold can you add more is there room to add more. How compatible is it with competitors stuff (Say an IBM Server with a Sun Storage Array) how well do they follow the standards so you are able to use the server even if the company who produced it died.

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.

Fool-proof uptime

[Anonymous Coward]

Can the system be expanded without rebooting, can you manage it using computer operators that wouldn't trust to determine which end of a mop should be applied to the floor.

Large SMP systems

[jamesdood]

Reviews for this sort of equipment are pretty much meaningless. I might buy a 16-way server to run Oracle, you might buy the same system to run large scale data analysis. PCs are easy to review and evaluate, they are commodity; can be used for any of multiple purposes. When I buy a large SMP system, I am buying it for a specific purpose, and the chances are it will never be re-purposed. So before spending uberbucks on a system I want to talk to the vendors other customers who are running similar workloads on the same tin. If the vendor gives me a long list of folks who use their systems for similar applications that is usually a good sign, if they can't then I move on.

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!

Re:Most important feature

[Bimo_Dude]

Hey! You know as well as I know that almost all or our servers resist physical attacks fairly well. Workstations on the other hand...

Re:Not Speed

[Anonymous Coward]

1 CPU 3 Ghz system vs. 3 CPU 1 Ghz System

Ashat, if you have ever done any real or psudeo simulation you wouldn't have said that. The 3 ghz system will outperform any (yes I said any) 3 by 1 ghz system. You have to factor in things like bus transfering information from one cpu to the other. Unless your bus is runing at 1+ghz even then a cpu has to divy up the work. So to complete debut your post, all simulation and real world expreinces I have witnessed shows that a single cpu of a given speed is faster than a multiples cpu that add up to the single cpu speed.

FMEA

[WeirdKid]

I always ask for an FMEA - Failure Mode and Effects Analysis - for typical and HA deployments. Big, expensive equipment tends to fail in big, expensive ways, and I want to know all the ways it can fail, all the potential effects of those failures, and what impact they have on my enterprise. Then, I want to know the recommended mechanisms and patterns that can be employed to minimize failure impact.

Re:Not Speed

[GeckoX]

BS plain and simple.

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.