tkimball wrote:

As we recently retired our sole T1000, I went into our config room to check the 
physical portions of your concerns.

Both the single power supply and single disk are 'showstoppers' for us, since 
we prefer as much redundancy as possible for something that's seriously running 
as production - which the backup environment definately qualifies.  :)  For a 
non-prod use both these items can be mitigated with UPS/static-power and a 
little-known 2xSAS conversion kit.

The lack of CD/DVD drive is more in-line with Sun's marketing of the device - 
that of a 'horizontal blade.'  If you've handled any of their blade chassis 
systems this analogy is very fitting, and should be taken into account when 
considering a T1000 system for something like backup.

As far as the FPU is concerned, that is specific to all T1 chip systems, 
including the T2000 and their blade.  The T2 chip (T5xxx series servers) has 
one FPU per core which is better (though not enough for a friend who needed to 
run physics engine processes on each thread).  From my own observations on a 
lowly E450, however, the lack of FPUs is not the #1 concern for a Networker 
Server or SN - raw I/O is (which the T2000 at least excels in quite nicely).

The concern regarding encryption is only slightly worrying to me, as I've 
already decided that if/when we need to go that route we'll do it in all 
hardware and use the T10K drive.  Curtis had a recent weblog post on them, 
which actually increased my favoring it over LTO-3/4.

I would like to know what the overhead is on Veritas VxVM/VxFS rather than ZFS, 
since we'll need to migrate our existing 15 TB of disk from the old Server.  
Hopefully I'll have my T2000 available for initial testing soon and will get 
back here next month with stats.

As for your initial ZFS testing, was EMC's release or Sun's EBS used?  It would 
be interesting to find out if Sun's recompile as EBS also enabled proper 
CoolThread support.  This would also confirm if general CPU speed will affect 
Networker on the Sun T1 line.

  I am using EMC's release (7.2.2 Jumbo11 with adv_file hotfix).

--TSK

-----=====-----
Timothy Kimball, Sungard/BRASS

--

-- Yaron.

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