Monday, June 30, 2008

Dead Green Servers


In a recent post, I relayed the information that the GE migration to the Linux server had to take place because the Sun Solaris servers upon which Centricity had been based were now at end-of-life status. In particular, the most recent version used for Centricity, the SunFire V480, is "retired and no longer orderable" according to Sun's website.
But wait, all is not lost! It seems that the SunFire V490 is now available to meet all your Solaris needs, and you can get it from $30,995.00 (US). Could it have done the job for Centricity? More than likely:
Pack your racks with UltraSPARC IV+ processors driving this 5 RU server and get over 5x faster performance compared to UltraSPARC III based Sun Fire V480 servers. Up to four processors per box with eight threads and 64GB of memory make it ideal for securing and delivering multiple applications and business processes or distributed databases.
Yeah, I think the V490 is probably beyond the V480's capabilities:

The Sun Fire™ V480 server is designed to deliver compute density and enterpriseclass RAS features at an affordable price. Its space-efficient, rack-optimized 5RU, 24-inch-depth enclosure provides excellent value per rack unit and contains up to four 1.05/1.2-GHz UltraSPARC® III Cu processors, each with 8 MB cache(L2), up to 32 GB of memory, integrated dual 10/100/1000-Mb/sec. Ethernet, and the Sun Fireplane Interconnect operating at 9.6 GB/sec.
OK, so what's the real reason behind the upgrade? Well, I dunno. To be fair, GE has been selling the Linux servers for several years, well before the Dynamic Imaging acquisition. And far be it from me to criticize them for being willing to change some software that I was not terribly pleased with in the first place. But was it the server reaching end-of-life that forced the issue? Or the software?

1 comment :

Anonymous said...

To be fair to GE (did I really say that? ;-) ) at the point the decision was made to migrate, continuing with solaris carried a hefty element of risk. Sun has since very much turned around and solaris is very much alive and kicking (the hardware maybe not so much but there is no longer a dependency there). But the risk at the time may have been enough given that the effort to migrate would have been fairly minor. Although in all such processes, there may be a hint that they used to decision to refactor some software they were unwilling to say was broken in the first place.