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To put the Xserve in perspective...

S

shadowfax0

macrumors 6502
Original poster
May 2, 2002
408
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Ok, first off I would like to say that DAMN! There are a TON of people on the forums right now (as of Monday 18:16 EST, I'm -5 GMT) Anyhow, being that Apple released the results of the Xserve's testing, I would like to list links to every server it beat, and DAMN PEOPLE, the Sun cost $40,000, it's crazy, anyhow, here are the links...

Sun Fire 4800 (Was beat in the Xinet RIP test)-
http://www.sun.com/servers/midrange/sunfire4800/index.html

Sun V100 - (Was Beat in WebBench)
http://www.sun.com/servers/entry/v100/

Sun 280R - (Was beat in Xinet Save, partially in Open)
http://www.sun.com/servers/entry/280r/

SGI 3200 - (Was beat in Xinet RIP Partially, and in Xinet Photoshop Open/Save)
http://www.sgi.com/origin/3000/configs.html

Dell PowerEdge 1650 - (Beat in Storage, Xinet Open/Save, WebBench, Xinet RIP)
http://www.dell.com/us/en/esg/topics/esg_pedge_rackmain_servers_1_pedge_1650.htm

IBM eServer x330 - (Beat in BLAST, and WebBench)
http://commerce.[url]www.ibm.com/cg...r=1&cgmenbr=1&cntry=840&lang=en_US&scrfnbr=73[/url]

Phew, that was alot of typing. Well there you have it :D
 
whoa! Although the Xserver may have beat the sun on a performance area (which I must admit is pretty crazy given it's price), check out what else that Sun can do. Hot swappable processors? Give me a break. That's the kind of uptime that you pay 40 grand for.

BEN
 
Originally posted by saabmp3
whoa! Although the Xserver may have beat the sun on a performance area (which I must admit is pretty crazy given it's price), check out what else that Sun can do. Hot swappable processors? Give me a break. That's the kind of uptime that you pay 40 grand for.
Click to expand...

That shows how confident they are of their processors. Only items that are expected to fail during the normal/expected service life should be hot swappable. Items like power supplies (spikes can kill/damage power supplies), hard drives, and fans.
 
Originally posted by hitman
Heh, Alpha just 0wned saabmp3. :D
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I have to wonder if this will bring the time honored tradition of the members here making the newbies their biatches. :eek: :eek: :p :D :cool: Of course, in order to get away with it, you have to have an avatar and/or be over 500 posts. :D
 
Originally posted by AlphaTech


That shows how confident they are of their processors. Only items that are expected to fail during the normal/expected service life should be hot swappable. Items like power supplies (spikes can kill/damage power supplies), hard drives, and fans.
Click to expand...

You're probably right here.

It couldn't possibly be in case one wants to upgrade processors without closing operations of their business/bank/database server. Nah......

Why would anyone want to upgrade the enormously failure prone UltraSPARC chip to a faster model without rebooting? Silly idea...

Trying to say that Sun making hot swappable CPUs is an indicator that they should be considered failure prone shows a serious näivete when it comes to big iron. Sun boxes run 60% of the internet for a reason: they are incredibly well built and well engineered machines, as saabmp3 pointed out, and have redundancy built in WHEREVER possible.

Damn newbies, gotta hate it when they're right.
 
Haha, very funny ;-). Try looking at sites like amazon.com, yahoo.com or ebay.com. Those are the kind of places that 24/7 uptime no matter what. Manu's don't make the things that need to get replaced the only things hot swappable. A good server is one that has nearly everything hot swappable. Also, if you knew ANYTHING about processors (besides G3's and G4's), you would know that proc's can go pretty easily if a fan dies. Ever seen an athalon or intel burn? It's pretty intresting.

BEN
 
Originally posted by saabmp3
Also, if you knew ANYTHING about processors (besides G3's and G4's), you would know that proc's can go pretty easily if a fan dies. Ever seen an athalon or intel burn? It's pretty intresting.
Click to expand...

IF you have a quality fan on the heat sink, the fan WON'T die and your processor WON'T burn. :rolleyes: Put a cheap fan on the heat sink, and you are only ****ing yourself (or your customers).

I have a server that I built well over two years ago, that has been running 24/7. The only times it has gone down (other then for updates) has been when the power has gone out. As soon as the power gets restored, it's back up and running (I have it set to automatically power back up). That is a system that is NOT running any flavor of unix either. :p It's a file server for us tech's where we hold all of the software installers, plus where we back up user files before we redeploy their system (for when they leave, or we update them to a newer one). BTW, it's running win2k advanced server... :p
 
ok, companies that deal with billions of dollars of e-commerce per day (like e-bay) can't afford even the possibility of the slightest chance that anything could go wrong... Granted that you may never have to change out a processor in a server's lifetime, if one ever does happen to fail on you, you'd wish that they were that easy to replace.

Now, I'm not saying that the xServe should have hot-swappable processors. I'm just saying that a $40000 server built for 100% up-time should have protection against almost every sort of hardware failure possible, and processor failure, although very rare, could still happen.

You wouldn't manufacture a car without airbags on the idea that it's the safest, most solid car on the market, would you?
 
Originally posted by G4scott
You wouldn't manufacture a car without airbags on the idea that it's the safest, most solid car on the market, would you?
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Would you want the customer to be able to swap out the engine on it?? CPU=Engine, airbag=USB 1.1 port. :p
 
Originally posted by AlphaTech


Would you want the customer to be able to swap out the engine on it?? CPU=Engine, airbag=USB 1.1 port. :p
Click to expand...

Actually, you can switch out an engine in a car. I also wasn't saying that the Xserve should have hot swappable processors, I was just making note of what that sun server can possibly do.

BEN
 
Originally posted by saabmp3
Actually, you can switch out an engine in a car.
Click to expand...

No shiet... but you need a full garage to do it, and you DON'T want the customer to do it. :rolleyes: IF you have ever seen it done, had it done, or done it yourself, you would KNOW how much of a pain in the ass it is.

Also, when it comes time to do something like that, you are [typically] better off not wasting the money and just get a new vehicle. I had it done on one of the vehicles I had, and it was money blown away. I had to replace the vehicle about a year later, since even the replacement engine had major problems.
 
ok, forget the whole car thing. It was a bad idea.

Lets just say that for people who need 100% uptime because the economy would be affected by a failure (can we say e-commerce?), hot swappable processors are probably a good idea.

For other server needs, since the chances of a processor failing are very low, they aren't necessary.
 
The chances of component failure increase with the number of components in the machine. It doesn't matter how reliable the components are - **** happens. If you have a machine with 32 processors, the chances of a CPU malfunction occurring are 32 times higher than the chances on a uniprocessor system. I'm not aware of any 32+ CPU systems WITHOUT hot-swappable CPUs; in a mission-critical server, do you want to have to power down the entire system, swap out the bad CPU, then power everything on again just to replace a faulty part?

The SGI Origin 3000 is one example of a completely modular system. If a CPU fails, it will switch off automatically and you can pop a new one in and switch that one on without a hiccup. If a memory module goes bad, you can switch off that bank, replace the module, and switch it on again, without having to restart the entire system. Same with disks, PCI, XIO, and everything else. You can replace an entire system backplane without rebooting. That's reliablility for ya.

I agree that total hot-swappable modularity would be kinda too much to ask for in a $4k server like the Xserve, but the Xserve is built for clustering; if a component in one of the Xserves in your rack of 20 Xserves goes bad, you can just pop a new Xserve in there without restarting the entire cluster. Same effective practice as with the big iron, really. No, you won't see the same reliability with one Xserve as with one redundant Sun Fire, but then again, you aren't paying as much, either.

Alex
 
I think they're pretty cool, proves even bastardized DDR is better than regular SDRAM.

I just feel bad for those who now have to pay $1,000 for the OS 10.2 Server "upgrade" since they bought before July 17th.

Almost as bad as M$ licensing.
 
Are there any benchmarks out there with the Xserve running desktop apps or anything that would give a clue as to how the DDR and ATA-100 perform using the "traditional" desktop like apps?
 
Originally posted by solvs

I just feel bad for those who now have to pay $1,000 for the OS 10.2 Server "upgrade" since they bought before July 17th.

Almost as bad as M$ licensing.
Click to expand...

I would venture a guess that people were expecting a rather expensive upgrade to 10.2 server as soon as Steve said that it would not be a free upgrade when xserve was unveiled. I think that is why so few people have ordered xserves. The are waiting until 10.2 is standard or a free upgrade. It makes some sense if you think about it.

LS
 
Originally posted by iPat
Are there any benchmarks out there with the Xserve running desktop apps or anything that would give a clue as to how the DDR and ATA-100 perform using the "traditional" desktop like apps?
Click to expand...
Real-world benchmarks? For a Mac? No, but I'm sure Apple would be happy to provide you with Photoshop filter benchmarks... :)
 
Originally posted by iPat
Are there any benchmarks out there with the Xserve running desktop apps or anything that would give a clue as to how the DDR and ATA-100 perform using the "traditional" desktop like apps?
Click to expand...

I just ran a very small photoshop test.
my mac - dual 1ghz with 1.5g of ram - 46 seconds
xserver - dual 1ghz with 2g of ram - 45 seconds

granted, the action set i ran pretty much does everything with the processors, not in ram......file was only 60MB.

neilt
 
Is there anyone out there that has the Xserve with the optional ATI Radeon8500 card; want to run some Quake III benchmarks?
Just messin' around, unless, there really is someone out there?????
 
Originally posted by Santiago
Hot-swappable processors and power supplies and such may be nice, but those $40,000 can buy several XServes, and if one of them blows, you can then repair/replace it.
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:D Very true...

I think that 42 xServes would kick any single sun server's @$$. :eek: :D :cool:

Can you imagine, redundant xServes? Have a rack of 42, 40 are used the whole time, the second two are for backup/failure incase one of the others dies, one of the backups kicks in... (ok, so not really redundant, but still cool). It would be better to have 2 racks of 42 xServes, so each xServe has a back up... I wonder of Apple would give you a discount? It would also make more sense to have all of the storage on xServe RAID boxes so that if one xServe dies, you don't lose the data on that machine... That would be cool, if you had the money :(
 
Originally posted by saabmp3
Haha, very funny ;-). Try looking at sites like amazon.com, yahoo.com or ebay.com. Those are the kind of places that 24/7 uptime no matter what. Manu's don't make the things that need to get replaced the only things hot swappable. A good server is one that has nearly everything hot swappable. Also, if you knew ANYTHING about processors (besides G3's and G4's), you would know that proc's can go pretty easily if a fan dies. Ever seen an athalon or intel burn? It's pretty intresting.

BEN
Click to expand...

Weren't those three of the websites taken down, due to hacking, during Christmas of 1999?
 
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