On Oct 30, 2006, at 1:30 PM, Dave McGuire wrote:

>> its sad, but you're entirely right. x86 won.
>
>   ...in some areas, like desktops.  Real server work, however, is  
> typically done on real computers.  You just don't see very many  
> serious datacenters full of PCs.  Some, sure...complete with a  
> constant revolving-door of repair parts, etc.  But for the most  
> part, that world is actually populated by UltraSPARCs, RS/6000s,  
> and big HPs.

Hah.  Get out much?  Apparently not.  Or did this post bubble up from  
5 years ago?

I work at a U.S. Government Lab, and trust me, our 'serious  
datacenter' is
full of "PCs".  1U, 2U, even 3U configurations.  Giant RAID boxes with
multiple terabytes.  We just installed a 2U 7.5TB box with quad Xeon  
5160's
the other day.  Since the CPUs are all Hyperthreaded, it looks to the OS
(Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, if you had to ask) like 8 CPUs.  It  
screams.
While we also still have some Suns (mostly V240's and V210's), the vast
majority of our in-house systems are now RHEL 3 and RHEL 4 x86  
boxes.  It's
just far more cost-effective and bigger-bang-for-the-buck than Suns are.
You can't fight City Hall ...

Oh, and we're converting our Sybase server from a SunFire 480R to a  
bunch of
Linux boxes running MySQL servers and one Sybase server for legacy  
missions,
because a Sybase license on Red Hat costs a fraction of what it costs  
on a Sun.

Sun hardware might be pretty solid and good for us home users (heck,  
my e-mail
server is an 11-year-old SPARCserver 20, which someday will be  
replaced by
my Ultra 60 when/if I can ever find a couple of dreary days to devote to
the task - kinda hard to come by when you live in Southern California),
but let's get real here - out in the real world where I live, "x86 won".

	- Greg