I'm fairly certain the tables would have to be dumped and imported,
but one of the reasons I run Solaris on Intel (A very viable choice, IMHO)
is the migration path to Sparc boxes.
I've been running Solaris on a Dell PowerEdge 4100, dual pentium pro
200, dual power supply, with external hardware RAID 5 array (27 GB), for
over two years with absolutely no downtime. This machine is pulling
quintriple duty providing NFS/NIS, MySQL and Oracle, Apache and PHP, SAMBA,
and routing (to keep NT corruption OFF of my UNIX network.)
One very significant benifit I've found is the near universal
availability (read easily compiled _or_ binary dists) of opensource
software. Sparc, Intel, and PowerPC Solaris use identical API's, so
everything short of assembly will run on Intel if it was developed for
Sparc.
The last I looked, a multiprocessor unlimited client server version
of Solaris x86 was about $1500, and version 7 (or 2.7, or SunOS 5.5.7
depending on who you ask :) comes with SSL web server, single-server
version of Legato Networker (as "Sostice Backup"), among others.
All told, I've got a server-intent machine, supported by a large
commercial organization (my management made the leap of faith required to
install their first network in about 1993. We are on the cutting edge of
early 80's technology. Obviously, Linux is still taboo here.) with uptime
unthinkable if the same box were running NT, at least 40% faster then the
same box running NT, which has always supported many large commercial
"vertical" applications such as Oracle server.
In short, I built an SMP server out of name brand components,
OpenSource and expensive software, with a direct migration path (needing
only to re-compile that which is compiled) to much MUCH larger systems, for
under $30,000. I figured this to be about half of an equivilent SPARC server
such as an ultra Enterprise 2.
John
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Sasha Pachev [SMTP:sasha@stripped]
> Sent: Wednesday, June 23, 1999 10:50 AM
> To: mysql@stripped
> Subject: Intel+BSD/Linux vs the Big Guys
>
> I have never seen a situation where Intel+BSD or Linux was not powerful
> enough for a company's MySQL server. Maybe I have not been around long
> enough... Can anybody share some examples when they had to go to the Big
> Guys (SGI, HP, Sun, etc) for their hardware solution for MySQL for
> non-political reasons and when it actually improved performance.
>
> I can understand when you get 64 processor Sun because you are
> processing so much data that you actually have to have 64 CPU's, but
> why would you get a low end Sun or HP when an equivalent Intel box will
> cost much less and will do the job just as well?
>
> --
> Sasha Pachev
> http://www.sashanet.com/ (home)
> http://www.direct1.com/ (work)
