(2) 8420's (2) 7420's VS (1) Superdome?

[Dan Pancamo]

If you(joe sysadmin) had a choice, would you choose several 8420's/7420's or go with one Superdome? We are looking to build about 10 hosts (mostly oracle) and I would like to hear from an sysadmin standpoint. Buy smaller boxes, or one large superdome?

[Matti_Kurkela]

_One_ of anything is always a bit painful if you're after high service uptimes 24/7/365.

Once in a while you might have to do a firmware update or something else that requires powering down the entire host. If you have everything in one large host, a maintenance break like that might be almost impossible to arrange. You would do well to set up your servers so that any update/maintenance work will not cause total outage or major loss of functionality.

An arrangement where you can pull one server (out of N) down for maintenance with no loss of functionality and only reasonable loss of processing capacity would be ideal.

If 24/7 availability is not among your requirements, the situation might be different.

[Jannik]

whith the superdome you have a loot of power but you could build this from small mashines and the the security from different boxes like the keystone (84) or the N (74).
I have build a Veritas Advanced RAC cluster for oracle with 3 rp8400 servers and after some patching from veritas it works like a dream.
Anothor problem with superdome mashines are the price of the support after 3 years.

Best Regards