On Tue, Jan 31, 2006 at 09:00:59PM -0500, Jon LaBadie wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 31, 2006 at 10:01:33AM -0500, stan wrote:
> > I'm going to upgrade our Amanda tape/index server.
> > 
> > I've narrowed the choice of machines down to one of 2 Sun Models. Either a
> > W2100Z, or a Ultra 40. I plan on using an Ultrim tape drive, and doing
> > compression on the server, so I need lot's of CPU power, and of course high
> > I/O throughput.
> > 
> > I was wondering what people thought about this selection?
> > 
> > The W2100Z is a SCSI machine, but I would still add a 2nd SCSI card
> > dedicated to the tape drive. The Ultra 40 looks like it would have more CPU
> > power, as the processors are dual core. I plan on using Solaris 10, if that
> > matters. Is SATA equal to SCSI for the disk I/O?
> 
> 
> My first impression was SATA is fine for holding and 4 threads
> of the Ultra 40 was a big plus.  But I decided to ask someone,
> Al Hopper, from the Solaris x86 mailing list whose opinion I value.
> 
> Al concurred that the Ultra 40 is the better choice and brought
> up a number of points in support of his decision that I'd not
> considered.  Things like end of product life and benefits of
> moving to Sun's new filesystem, ZFS, in the near future.
> 

Thanks!

My mind is now made up :-)

He has very convincing arguments. And I may need to think about
Amanda configs a year or so down the road. Let's see virtual tapes on big disk
with the disk driver itself doing the compression......

Thanks for taking the time to explain this so well to your resource,
and thank him for his excellent analasys!

-- 
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Terror 
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