RE: [TCLUG:6469] Ebay downtime

[lamfada@lugh.net]

On Mon, 14 Jun 1999 06:25:59 -0500 (CDT), Ben Kochie <ben@nerp.net> wrote:
>I belive the MS case was specificaly against the Ultra Enterprise 10000 system.
>

If so, eBay needs better admins - these things are designed to be practically
impossible to bring down.

>if you know anything about the 10000, MS should stop whining and build a box
>that can do as much as the 10k.
>
>64 processors?
>hot swapable: CPU, RAM, system boards, I/O boards?
>12gig/sec CPU->memory bandwidth?
>

screw the 10K, I want the SGI monster machine, Origin2000.  Each machine is one
to some number of nodes, basically up to 128 processor.  It uses Cray-designed
interconnects, which scale up as you put more CPU / disk / network into them.  

128 processors
256GB memory
80GB/sec _sustained_ I/O bandwidth
ccNUMA memory architecture
Kick ass Iris as your console :)

The 10K, OTOH, can be divided up into "virtual machines", up to 8, each of which
gives the appearance of being a full standalone server.  I do not know what
exactly eBay's problem is, but I doubt it is the Sun box or even Slowaris, but
probably their proprietary software or Oracle.  Still, it is not strange that a
company that can not build an OS that is stable or a database that doesn't 
corrupt itself would hold up the apparant failure of implementation of their
competitors' solutions as proof that there must be something wrong with the 
products themselves.  Their PR people are good enough to know that it really
does not matter what the problem turns out to be, as long as they take their
potshots now, the PHBs will hear those and ask the question "Why aren't we 
using NT?". 

>come on.. NT can't even use more than 16 CPU's
>

Yes, but put that (and all of the other arguments) in word the PHBs can
understand, and are not bored by, and at the same time have emotional appeal -
after all, few arguments are won by logic, and few products are sold by logic.
Take the Pentium* vs K* vs WinChip vs Cyrix.  Intel's only real advantage over
these other chips is floating point performance.  In many ways, the AMD chips
are better, but in this arena, Intel is king.  Yet thousands of people must 
have chips that say Intel on them for no logical reason.  They don't do
scientific / numerical processing.  They do word processing.  The only thing 
that most people do that benefits from fast floating point math is first
person games, eg., Quake*, Half-life, etc., and for these purposes, the K6* is
admirably suited.  But businesses and most consumers do not buy AMD because
they have emotional investment in Intel.  I admittedly run Intel chips, but I
run some FP-math intensive processes, and would rather fork the cash for 
something with real power, like DEC Alpha or UltraSparc or even G3/G4 based.


-Chris

>On 13-Jun-99 Bob Tanner wrote:
>> Not really linux related, but unix related.
>> 
>> Anyone know why Ebay went down? According to MS's website it is a problem
>> with
>> ebay's Sun Enterprise Servers and Solaris.
>> 
>> Anyone confirm this?
>>