On 2/9/07, Joe Royer <jroyer at digitalmotorworks.com> wrote:
> Austin,
> Have you actually used a niagra as a backup server?  Does it
> really have the bus/backplane bandwidth to handle life as a master/media
> server?  I'd love to hear some real world experience (what kind and how
> many tape drives) as it's about time for me to upgrade the hardware in
> my linux master/media.

No, I haven't used a Niagara system with NetBackup yet, but everything
I read about it sounds like it would be good for this.  My
understanding is that each of the 8 cores can finish a memory
operation on the same cycle and each of the 4 threads per core can be
following different memory operations.  People who are doing database
work and web serving are raving about it.  People who do analytical
and scientific work are complaining about it.

That makes sense when you consider the clock speed (~1GHz) and that
the 8 cores share one floating point unit.  It is designed to support
multithreaded workloads and lots of I/O.  To me this sounds like
NetBackup!!!

I don't know the specs on the backplane, but it has 2x 133MHz/64bit
PCI-X slots and 3x PCIe x8 slots, plus an on-board SAS controller.
The memory bandwidth is something like 25 Gbytes/sec.

There is good info about the chip (not the whole server) at
opensparc.net.  I hope to hear about other user experiences or give it
a test drive myself.

Austin