YC,
I recently did a less-than comprehensive assessment of lower-end Sun and HP servers to replace our aging L class dual-processor system. In our case the majority of our performance problems were disk I/O related (too few locally-attached SCSI disks in a Jamaica disk enclosure) and so a SAN was mandatory, but our L class was also out of warranty and so there was a large amount of financial pressure (AU$1K per month) to buy a new server as well. I therefore went out to HP's solutions centre here to benchmark our database (Informix 921) and data against the various configurations of hardware which included:
- 4-way Zeon (DL580) running Linux ... with local disks not too bad bang for the buck, but with SAN it was horrible purely becuase of a) poor driver support and b) because it was so easy to step outside the 'supported configuration' boundaries. Quickly ruled out.
- 2-way RP5470 (running PA8700 with SAN) ... this was a real performer (compared to our L class) but monitoring using Glance indicated that the key reason was the lack of disk I/O bottleneck which meant that the server could run at maximum throughput, with both CPUs flat out. To prove the point, we dynamically added a 3rd CPU and the benchmark runtime decreased linearly with the increase in CPU power.
- 2-way Itanium 1.5GHz (RX2600 with SAN). This was the star performer and beat everything else by some margin. However, application support (Informix, Data Protector) was lacking and so it ruled out this processor in our situation. Sad thing is that it was cheaper too...
- We also seperately benchmarked a Sun v240 (dual USparc 1GHz IIIe) which was not a bad system at all, and performed comparably, but we were put off by the limited scalability and upgradability (you cant simply throw in later CPUs to get a boost in performance). Last nail in the coffin was the recent bad press on the Sun processor roadmap.
In the end we went with a SAN and the successor of the RP5470, the RP3440, since the PA8800 chips are dual core (so you can run 4 cores with 2 'sockets' as HP calls it) and it's also identical to the RX2600 in terms of motherboard etc so later you are supposed to be able to drop in Itanium CPUs and hey-presto you have an Itanium server. Point to note also; HP have just released the dual-core Itanium called the MX2 ... which looks to be a teriffic performer. Once app support catches up with the platform, then later we'll be able to migrate to the Itanium platform without buying a whole new server which is very attractive. In summary, the HP kit was slightly more expensive than the Sun kit, but we felt it was more 'future-proofed', particularly with Itanium in the ascendancy.
Hope this helps,
Jason
If a man talks in a forest and there is no woman to hear, is he still wrong?
