Subject: Re: Will we be able to update to YDL 2 ????
christopher.murtagh@wcg.mcgill.ca
Date: Tue Jun 05 2001 - 10:54:21 MDT
On Tue, 5 Jun 2001, andu wrote:
>If bang for buck was the issue why didn't you guys choose PC
>boxes(Athlon) with say RH 6.2 or Slackware? Just curious (nothing to do
>with YDL).
For a couple of reasons:
1) We already owned a couple of G4s (G4 servers with OS X Server) for a
streaming project that was moved to another IT unit.
2) Honestly, I don't believe that Intel hardware isn't all that cheap for
what you get. From my experience doing tech support, I've yet to find an
Intel box that was happy to deal with SCSI. When we priced similar
systems, a G4 server (redundant power supply) vs. Dell machines with the
same setup and power, the G4 was cheaper! This surprised me as well. We
also wanted to buy our hardware from a vendor that had decent support, no
noname machines. So, that meant Dell, IBM, Compaq, Apple, HP, etc..
3) We have a pretty decent relationship with Apple, and we wanted to
strengthen it.
4) The rest of our office (all 6 of us) is running MacOS for development,
(BBEdit and FileMaker mostly -
http://blues.wcg.mcgill.ca/~chris/my_desk.html) and we are all Apple fans.
So sticking to the same hardware meant that we could replace a machine if
it had hardware problems with one from the office. Certainly not ideal,
but less downtime and a decent temporary solution.
5) We wanted to keep our options open for possibly integrating OS X and
WebObjects. From recent experiments, this will be a while away if at all.
6) The G4s just *look* cool. Ok, that isn't a very convincing argument
but it's still my favorite. :-)
And with our setup, we have several machines doing separate tasks rather
than one honking server doing it all. This means that if we have hardware
failure, only one part of our site will be down. I can also log into any
of the other machines and have it take on the services of the downed
hardware. So, we get extra redundancy for free.
Also, we are open to having Intel hardware (or Sun as well for that
matter) should we find a machine that does what we need for a reasonable
cost. We are about to give our database machine a whole lot more work as
we start to put our course calendar online for the first time. The
G4/DP500 might not be able to handle the load. In this case, we might buy
a bigger box to do this job (which would likely mean a sun machine).
Cheers,
Chris
--Christopher Murtagh Webmaster / Sysadmin Web Communications Group McGill University Montreal, Quebec Canada
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a24 : Tue Jun 05 2001 - 10:01:42 MDT