Re: SPARC vs Opteron: Which to buy?
- From: Dan Foster <usenet@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 18 Dec 2005 19:06:05 -0600
In article <Y9gpf.42968$6e1.39549@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Reginald Beardsley <pulaskite@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> I *am* looking at local disk (which I *hate* for anything but the OS and
> have done everything I could to eliminate). 100 baseT is a significant
> bottleneck right now and there is *no* possibility of conversion to
> Gigabit. It also probably wouldn't help since the servers are now 20
> miles away from me. :-(
Your biggest single problem is simply that your needs appears to be too
big for an internal drives-only setup.
You're talking about 500+ GB workloads which suggests you need disks
that total at least 550-600 GB of capacity (or greater).
There is *nothing* that Sun sells in this capacity for internal drives
for any of its systems right now, unless you buy a large system.
Sun has only qualified drives up to 250 GB for the x86 systems.
Greater would probably(?) work, but you'd be on your own there.
I haven't tried anything bigger yet, so don't know, I'm afraid.
The biggest disks available on the market is 500 GB SATA right now. I do
not know if you can replace Sun's internal drives with an off-the-shelf
SATA drive or not.
Another point to consider: you are *strongly* encouraged to run a
mirrored setup for at least the boot+OS stuff on internal disks.
So if you had, let's say, 2x80 GB drives, mirroring would only give you
80 GB of usable capacity, minus any filesystem or other overhead.
Both the Ultra 20 and X4100 only takes 2 internal drives.
So if you get two 500 GB SATA drives from retail, and get it working by
swapping out the Sun-supplied drive(s) -- this is untested and not
certain to work, you still would have just under 500 GB of usable
capacity if mirrored.
Mirroring greatly leads itself to availability and lessens the impact of
losing a drive -- no need to reinstall OS, apps, config files, license
keys, etc. Lose a drive? No problem. System stays up. You swap dead
drive with a new drive whenever ready.
You don't *have* to mirror, but not advisable to not mirror at all, for
the internal drives with the OS. It's up to you as to if you want to
mirror external drives, depending on the value of data and frequency of
backups.
External disk stuff would have to be from someone other than Sun.
I think you're going to be looking at perhaps 2x80 GB SATA drives for
internal drives [to keep costs down] and a small 4-disk slot external
enclosure and perhaps 2 500 GB SATA drives to plug in, with room for
future drive expansion if your workload grows over the next several years.
E.g. something like this:
http://www.satadrives.com/qudralulg3es.html
....which is a 4 SATA drive external case. It takes up to 4 hot-plug SATA
1.0 or 2.0 drives. That model goes for about USD $300, but there are
other smaller and cheaper ones at:
http://www.satadrives.com/
For instance, they do have a 2 drive external enclosure for about half
the price if you're pretty sure you'll never outgrow two drives ever.
Then you'd want to buy a SATA HBA (adapter) with however many SATA ports
matching number of SATA drives. And also, SATA drives themselves -- 500
GB SATA drives are going for about USD $350 to USD $400.
If you buy one or two external SATA drives, then you'd be fine with the
Adaptec SATAConnect 1205SA which is a supported 2 port SATA HBA for
Solaris 10 03/05. Costs about USD $50.
If you go for the 1205SA, you will also need to buy a USD $10 metal host
bracket for the card that will allow you to plug in two external cables
to the card:
http://www.satadrives.com/satabrackets.html
(Upper right item.)
Bottom line: 2 external 500 GB SATA drives + enclosure + cables + HBA +
bracket should be about USD $950 total. I don't think you can get a
decent quality external 500 GB-1000 GB setup any cheaper than this.
External PATA drive setup wouldn't cost much less -- if at all, and
cabling would be nutso in comparison.
The Solaris/x86 Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) is at:
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/data/sol/
The HBAs (adapters/controllers) are listed here:
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/data/sol/components/views/disk_controller_all_results.page1.html
> I'm planning on 4 GB of core whatever system I get. The paging
Sounds good. :)
> behavior of Unix pretty much requires it for what I'm doing. This is
It's pretty good, especially with Solaris in particular.
> the reason for my question about single processor machines. Many
> (most??) dual processor machines divide the memory between the CPUs
> which accomplishes some of what WS_QUOTA did in VMS.
Ahh, yes, WSQUOTA and other UAF parameters. I'm familiar with VMS.
(For the Solaris folks here; WSQUOTA set a per-user limit on the working
set -- total amount of physical memory the process was allowed to use at
any one time.
There were other quotas such as detailed job quotas, process quotas,
memory quotas such as PGFLQUO -- how much paging space you were allowed
to use if needed.)
> Swap interleave may be independent of technology, but the results are
> not. In particular on the 3/60 interleaving swap was a performance
> gain *only* if the drives had identical speeds and partition sizes. I
3/60 was a real long time ago. Computing has come a long way since. :)
I've run everything on all sorts of disk technologies, and I don't
recall seeing any particularly dramatic performance difference with
either a default arrangement via a logical volume manager or a specially
laid out setup on any box made in the last 10 years.
The only exception would be relatively slow disk technologies. But in
general, not a problem with modern day SCSI/SATA/PATA.
> can imagine a lot of reasons why SCSI interleave would work and ATA
> would not in terms of performance. Has anyone actually tested the
> performance? I can provide a suitable test program if someone wants
> to investigate. (It's just a big loop that increments the values
> stored in an array too large to fit in core)
You can achieve similar results with one of iozone's parameters, by the
way -- it's a disk benchmarking tool. One of its many tests involves
deliberately overflowing physical memory in such a way that it brings
out the true unbuffered disk I/O performance.
I don't recall what flag or value for iozone, though. Tons of them!
But in short, I think the performance difference would be negligible for
modern setups. OSes has been moving away from hardcoding knowledge of
direct disk properties as drive technology change over time.
> SATA & SCSI seem to be quite competitive. What about parallel ATA
> (e.g the Blade 1500 or the Ferrari )
PATA? Yuck. :) Well, it'd probably work fine.
But SATA has tricks like NCQ which is SCSI-ish, dedicated channels
[essentially a point-to-point bus], hot plug support, much more sane
cabling of higher quality, amongst other things.
Think about it this way: when a disk dies in maybe 4 or 5 years from
now, what kind of disks will be on the shelves? Probably mostly SATA.
Better to go with SCSI or SATA -- you have a much better chance of being
able to more easily replace parts down the road that way.
Between SCSI and SATA, SATA's much cheaper. I wouldn't recommend PATA
drives for new purchases today.
> Has anyone put a SATA disk >250 GB in an Ultra 20 (or an ATA disk in a
> Blade 1500) and been able to access the entire disk. (large disk woes
> were why I abandoned Solaris 8 on x86)
Ahh, yes, in these days, systems often had an ATA controller with LBA-48
mode support -- which limited it to disks of 137 GB usable or less.
Today, the only real limitation is that you cannot exceed 1 TB on a
single disk (or LUN, in case of a disk array with combined disks).
I heard from a colleague whom talked with Sun engineers at a convention
two weeks ago that S10U1 (Solaris 10 Update 1; the first big refresh of
Solaris 10 since the initial release) or S10U2 was slated to remove that
particular restriction for disks with an EFI label.
S10U1 is slated to be released in about a month. S10U2 is probably quite
some time off.
> FWIW I work in the oil industry. 5 years ago it was almost exclusively
> Sun territory, but Sun was a little too slow off the blocks and Linux
That's what I heard from a friend and former colleague whom works for an
oil company along the corridor of petrochemical companies in east Houston.
-Dan
.
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