HA comparison comments

[Doug Hughes]

>I cannot speak for SGI's HA solutions, but we
>have Origin 2000's with 4 CPU's and 512mb of memory
>and Sun 4000's with 4 CPU's and 512mb of memory.
>The Origins are an order of magnitude faster than
>the Sun machines.  This is especially evident for
>IO intensive applications (Disk IO).  I was the Sun
>guy coming into an SGI shop and I have had to eat 
>my words...The Origins are very fast, too bad there
>is little 3rd party support for Irix....Joe

Ah, but are you sure that this isn't a case of xfs  vs. old UFS?
One can clearly see from lmbench (Usenix '96) benchmarks that xfs
is much faster than sun's implementation of UFS, though linux ext2fs
beats both handily.  I would like to see the results of the lmbench
disk latency benchmark for the 4000, though.


Not saying that this isn't significant, but before we blame the I/O
subsystem, let's make sure it's at fault and not the file system in use.


--
____________________________________________________________________________
Doug Hughes					Engineering Network Services
System/Net Admin  				Auburn University
			doug@eng.auburn.edu