Last night another one of the Sun boxes went down. This is the second Sun box (both E450's I believe) that has gone down, out of the three that I'm responsible for monitoring apps on.
This is hardly a unique case. I've heard of plenty of other problems with Sun boxes in the past, so I'm starting to think that their big claim to fame of "solid, scalable hardware" might just be a lot of fluff. At the very least it makes me wonder if you couldn't just accomplish the same thing with a cheapo Intel/AMD box.
Sun advocates will start chomping at the bit with stuff like hot-swappable CPU's, blah, blah. The thing is, you could probably just buy two cheapo systems (using one as a backup) every three years for what it costs to purchase a single Sun monster and pay for maintenance. If one cheapo system goes down, rely on the cheapo backup until it can be fixed or replaced completely. Using this approach you would probably still have plenty of cash to spare compared to the Sun strategy AND you have backup machine.
When I start my own company, I can tell you right now there aren't going to be any Sun boxes in it.
-Dom
Re:Sun Hardware...
djberg96 on 2003-06-22T22:26:54
Heh...smartass. Well, I haven't heard about too many of the big boxes with all their original parts.When I first joined the Air Force I was given an IPX (!) to work with. Talk about SLOW! I do kinda miss those "boot time coffee breaks", though.
:)
6 years old and to have hardware starting to fail on old hardware is pretty normal. I highly doubt you'd see 6 years of life on a cheap PC. I never liked the E450 myself as they were a PITA to rack and obviously not designed for anything more than a coffee table in a corner office. The main CPAN archive runs on a Sparc as does the search engine, both of which have pretty reliable uptime. Maybe you should check the operating environment when so many of them are going at once.
