Anyone Here running on x86-64 Hardware Yet

[Rhugga]

--- Aly Dharshi <aly.dharshi at telus.net> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> 	Have you considered looking at Sun's AMD offerings, they have a AMD line, the 
> V20z and V40z, they are quite spiffy, they are basically Newisys boxes, they 
> have licensed this technology. They have another design going on around the AMD 
> chips called Galaxy which is still to appear. This will be a full Sun design. 
> Don't quote me on this Galaxy bitty.
> 
> 	IBM has also got AMD64 offerings, HP has ditched the Itanic 2 and jumped in a 
> hurry onto the AMD64 wagon. I believe that the EMT64 techology in the Intel 
> chips are licensed from AMD ??? I think so. So you should be able to run Red Hat 
> 64 or Fedora Core 64 bit on it.
> 
> 	The AMD64 chips should run your 32bit software without hassle. I think that you 
> should be okay. But if it is over the next 18months I am sure that there will 
> much more improvements on the AMD64 area. Sun should have their V80z out by then 
> too. They are pushing the AMD64 platform quite hard.
> 
> 	Cheers,

I have been a die-hard Sun fan for almost 15 years and due to all my recent dificulties in dealing
with them has made me decide to give other Vendors a chance. I don't wish it to be like this,
dumping Sun at this point would be like an NFL veteran saying goodbye to football after a 15 year
career. Just some of their recent policies and hard-nosed approach to various things have left us
with a bad taste in our mouth. I am giving the servers you mentioned a glance, however, they don't
offer anything a few other Vendors' servers don't and the price is nearly identical as well. Thus,
it basically boils down to a support issue, which is where a lot of our recent difficulties with
Sun stemmed from. We are already a large IBM shop, we have a 500-node Linux cluster, and to be
honest I haven't been real impressed with their hardware or their support (the latter is more of
an issue with IBM as well). We also have a SAN from IBM and have nothing but problems with it the
2 years we have had it. We have had 2 total downtimes lasting 13 days for the last one and if it
didn't cost so damn much I would have set it out on the street for the garbage men.

At this point I am gonna give HP a shot, at least get a pair of the DL-585's to do my initial
evaluation with. I may still stick with Solaris 9 x86 until a solid 2.6 based version of Fedora
Core is supported, but I feel I need to test the waters elsewhere as far as hardware goes.

Thx for the info however.
-rhugga