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Attn: AnandTech staff - Stability ranking of AT servers

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<compaq sells more servers than Sun, Dell, and HP combined...>

Wrong.

Compaq is king no more in the server market, Dell is #1. Old news.
link

Personally, I will still buy Compaq for NT systems (mail, file server) as I think they are better because of experience. Wouldn't touch the X86 architecture for applications (especially database) because the X86 architecture doesn't scale processors 1:1 with performance gains.

Anandtech could have used a couple Sun servers (<$100K) and a hardware raid rack in one rack stand instead of 5 rack systems, but then again, it would have cost them more money because they probably got alot of stuff for free, just for documenting it in an article (kudos to them). NT (whether on AMD or Intel) is not the best web platform for extreme performance, just ask Amazon or Google. Ebbay, of course, is the exception, but they spent millions (subsidized by M$) on the X86 archetecture, which would have been cheaper on unix of course. Microsoft marketing needed a major E-site that used their software. Just my humble opinion here, Microsoft does have it's place for certain apps after all.

Funny that SAP recommends SQL Server as the preferred choice after partnering with M$. I feel sorry for all those SAP users waiting for clunky SQL Server to process transacations driving up costs in unproductive time.
 
Well I smell a strong anti-MS bias from you. 🙂

SQL 2000 is quite a performer, IMHO. I don't have decades of IT experience but I do know that most MS server products improved tremendously. I found it quite impressive how SQL Server is now literally dominating the TPC-C benchmarks that used to be Oracle's domain just 2 years ago.

I guess that the UNIX servers COULD be cheaper. How about the labour cost though? I remember from one of the articles where Anand mentioned paying quite a bit of money just to contract someone to get a database server administered.

AnandTech.com was also built on Cold Fusion, which runs better on NT than it does on other platforms, last time I checked. This could no longer be the case by now, but it sure was the case when they made the transition to Cold Fusion.

Just my 2¢.
 
Yeah, I'll admit I'm a little biased.

Without doubt, I think you are right that unix is harder to administer, but once mastered, it is the only way.

Of course, my main point is that Unix is a more efficient OS because it it simple and doesn't have the overhead that MS NT has.

MS TPC scores were rigged because the didn't have updatable keys (very intensive processing), as Larry E pointed out. DB2 came out with one more recently that nearly tripled the MS and Oracle scores, but that was probably flawed somehow too.

ColdFusion is often the joke of the web community because it is very inflexible and proprietary. For beginners, it's a great tool (RAD) to quickly set up web pages that doesn't require knowedge of a low level programming language. Anandtech is a good site to use it because they can't afford expensive hourly programmers and they have the hardware to support the ineffiencies. Most code hackers, however, want complete control over performance and design, which no RAD tool will give you (maybe RAD with Java is another story). If you ever programmed a PDP-11, you know what truly efficient and elegant programming is really about. Just ask any of the Bell labs old timers (DR or BK). Now people just bump up the hardware to compensate for poor performing applications.

Anyways, I guess I'm an avid opensource person, and when MS stated a position that opensource was harmful, that didn't sit well with me.


UltraDev
WebCVS &amp; DAV
Apache
Tomcat
Perl

Now we're talking serious web environment. Just don't expect to set it up quickly and get ready to pay someone $200/hour to maintain it😉
 
Well I'm quite pro-MS biased. 🙂

My ideal environment for &quot;serious&quot; web development:

Windows 2000 + Application Center 2000 for load balancing
A site built from multiple COM components
Stay away from interpreted script (ASP) as much as possible
Fast implementation is always nice
Mostly IE clients with MSXML parser installed so that some of the server load can be shared with the client (i.e. XML) - but compatibility with other web clients should be considered
Friendly UI is a must - the world most robust, secure and powerful application is useless if the interface sucks

Such web site gets a 5-star rating in my book.

You're probably thinking that I am now talking like a typical MS head. 🙂 Well I try to give an objective judgement to most stuff but for my purposes (and for the jobs I want) MS way of web development is the way to go. Maybe it's because I am used to doing things their way.

P.S. Add a dual Palomino workstation to that list 😉
 
huggie- I said compaq sells more servers, meaning not just x86 based, not only in the US, and not costing less than $25000 all of which that article you linked to imply. Take a world wide marker, remember that they offer other systems not based on x86, and also that quite a lot of their servers cost way more than 25K and you see where I'm comming from.
 


<< Worldwide, Compaq is still the largest PC server vendor with a market share of 29 percent and 234,700 shipped servers during the first quarter this year, according to Dataquest. Dell is number two with a 21.6 percent market share and 174,700 servers shipped. IBM is again third with 13.9 percent market share and 113,000 servers shipped, and HP is fourth with 11.2 percent market share and 90,400 servers shipped of the total 810,000 PC servers shipped worldwide during the first quarter. >>



thats from the article you posted... and thts still not counting servers over 25k and non PC (x86).
 
The place I work is a Compaq Service Agent...and Damn do we I see a load of Compaq Servers go through networking....

Overclockers Australia run thier site on Odin, a BP6 with a couple of C366's at 550. OCAU can build thier own server because (compared to AT) it doesn't need the immense processing power of a site that has a forum 57,000 users big! (I still cant beleive that!).

I would love to see the AT servers in detail. I read a thread a while ago saying that AT were pushing 12Mb/Sec bandwidth. Wow.
 


<< ColdFusion is often the joke of the web community because it is very inflexible and proprietary. For beginners, it's a great tool (RAD) to quickly set up web pages that doesn't require knowedge of a low level programming language. Anandtech is a good site to use it because they can't afford expensive hourly programmers and they have the hardware to support the ineffiencies. Most code hackers, however, want complete control over performance and design, which no RAD tool will give you (maybe RAD with Java is another story). >>

What the hell are you talking about? CF is very flexible. Seeing as how it integrates with COM, Java, CORBA, XML, EJBs, Servlets, etc?????

Neither Tomcat or Perl offer clustering (yet), which CF has built right in.

 
huggie- I never said I like Compaq the most... and/or that MS is the best, I just stated that they were good servers...
 
Perl is a language and not an application, so no, it doesn't have clustering. Neither does C, CPP, Java...etc. However, it can be used to efficiently route httpd requests to the server with the lightest load using a subroutine with about 100 lines of code.

<<What the hell are you talking about? CF is very flexible. Seeing as how it integrates with COM, Java, CORBA, XML, EJBs, Servlets, etc?????>>

My statement wasn't intended to bash CF, CF has it's place.

When to compare CF to perl, CF is inflexible. They make a good product and provide Rapid Application Development tools that are painless to administer. The point is that perl is more flexible (100 times at least) than CF because it is a lower level language. I won't argue that CF won't get you up and running quickly and have a lot of interfaces. It just doesn't have the flexible that a lower level programming language has, not that you would really need to plus up S registers on your CPU, but you could with perl and you can't with CF.

Can CF do all this?
Current 'Free' Perl Modules
 
<<Besides, CF can run Perl, so everything Perl has, CF can do.>>

Yeah, I thought of that also 😉 My response, Perl can do anything that CF can do too, so there 😛

Just my opensource mentality. Rather spend big dollars on development time than on RAD software. six one way, 1/2 dozen the other.
 
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