Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[pfosse]

The shop I work in (about 50 people and about 30 servers), was based half on 2 way Intel servers for our Microsoft stuff and half on HP PA-RISC computers for our Unix stuff (mostly Oracle database work (my job)). Last year we looked at 3 alternatives to upgrade our 3-4 year old PA-RISC computers. We looked at HP-UX on Itanium, Linux (32 bit) on 2 way Xeons, and Linux (64 bit) on Opteron. I was a minor part of the evaluation team (everyone on the team knew I was a big AMD fanboy). We all agreed the HP-UX on Itanium was the safest choice, but it cost about 3 times more than the Xeon and Opteron choices and we all agreed that was too much. We all liked the Opteron boxes, but you couldn't get the 385 last year when we made the decision. The 585 is a good box, but not cost competitive with the 2 way Xeons. We had some troubles with 64 bit Linux (the Fibre Channel controller we were using didn't have a 64 driver (it does now, but we were doing a 3 week evaluation last year). We backed the Opterons back to 32 bit Linux and they performed well, but kind of lost their advantage over the Xeons. We decided to go with the Xeons because we have a ton of those boxes and find them reliable. Opterons made a good impression, just not quite good enough. The lead of the evaluation team did tell me (knowing I'm an AMD fanboy), that if the HP DL 385 was available in 4Q04, he would have recommended that box hands down. It would have been the equal to the Xeons plus had the option to go 64 bit later. We didn't even go with the EM64T Xeons (which surprised me), we kind of wanted to, but there was some purchasing problem that they were approved yet by our internal purchasing folks (neither were the Opterons) and we could have gotten an exception, but we didn't bother.

Now we are building this whole big 32 bit cluster with 16 machines, just as 64 bit computing is taking off. We got the 16 machines for like $4,000 a piece, so I guess this is no big waste (like 1% of our annual budget), but it seems like we should have at least gotten the EM64T Xeons, because a cluster has to be all 32 bit or all 64 bit.