Subject: Re: Will we be able to update to YDL 2 ????
From: andu (undo@cloud9.net)
Date: Tue Jun 05 2001 - 11:45:50 MDT
christopher.murtagh@wcg.mcgill.ca wrote:
>
> 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
Sounds reasonable to me.
> --
>
> Christopher Murtagh
> Webmaster / Sysadmin
> Web Communications Group
> McGill University
Andu
> Montreal, Quebec
> Canada
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