For some reason i have always had a strange affinity for server hardware, especially weird server hardware. My neighbors used to hate me because i have about four filled racks in the basement of my condo, which is separated from their basement only by a single wall. That was until i insulated the hell out of my server area. Anyways i have a lot of older x86 and Itanium stuff, and some IBM power stuff, but i have never had a SPARC server. That used to be because SPARC servers were expensive as hell, but that's not the case since Oracle took over. Normally i found myself hating oracle as i really didn't like their database software at all, but now that they own sun and have opened up a lot of their software i find myself liking them more and more (which i never thought would happen). What happened was i got an offer for a full rack of Sun Fire T2000's for $100 per server. The guy offering this is a good friend who wholesales used server equipment, but he can't seem to get anyone to buy these. I understand why as no small business wants to use SPARC for a lot of reasons. Unfortunately he know's i like this stuff and have been looking at SPARC servers for a while. These machines are really cool from a technology perspective. x86 processors have virtualization extensions that rely on software to handle the actual virtualization. These SPARC processors were designed to handle virtualization at the hardware level. Essentially it is a big hardware hypervisor that does everything VMware's ESXi software does, but without any software. It removes that software layer entirely and is insanely reliable. Each machine has a 8 core processor with 8 threads per core. That totals to 64 logical processors to add to VM's, not to mention the 64GB of ram in each box. I figure that Solaris is free for testing and development environments (which i fell my basement qualifies as) and the VM functionality is built into the box with the control software also being free. So that comes to about $2100 for a huge VM cluster that i could have a lot of fun with. $2100 is a lot for something i just use for mostly fun and web development, but it seems like a pretty good deal. Hell i could sell all of the ram out of these servers for almost $2100. Am i thinking somewhat logically here? I know it's older hardware. EDIT: and i put this in the wrong spot... was supposed to go in off topic /facepalm
Just to clarify. We talking about 21 servers which each have 64GB RAM so 1344 GB RAM in total? How much wattage does the whole cluster take? You could probably start a whole gameserver hosting business with that kind of equipment.
Game servers suond like a pretty good idea actually. I'm thinking Minecraft, which wants as much RAM as possible apparently. And a bit of latency doesn't hurt it all that much either, I think (at least when compared to a FPS) - no idea about bandwidth requirements though. But: Mind the energy costs, depending on where you are located that might be a big factor. Then again you say you already have four racks... You might eventually run into a limit with your energy provider, or your power lines. Or worse yet, trip a silent alarm and have the cops knock on your door because they suspect you use all that power to grow pot (this has happened to some bitcoin miners). And what about the waste heat? Your basement isn't going to get any cooler by adding more hardware.
I can guess why he's having difficulty selling them - they only have about 1 year of support left, and Oracle have refused to make any commitment about extended support, so the sort of big companies who tend to use Sun kit don't want to touch them. Incidentally, I'm pretty sure that the T-2000 is an UltraSparc T1 box, so it has 4 threads per core, not 8. The -T1 also only has a single FPU per die, so any workloads with floating point absolutely kill the performance. if you are running stuff with lots of threads and very little or no FP, then they can be very quick. The whole Niagara architecture was really designed for webapps, and they obviously did a good job, since that's where it works really well.
Funny story actually, i already had that happen once. Across the street from me there are apartments notorious for people growing pot. Luckily i have a friend who works for the local PD who called me when my power provider turned me in. It was pretty funny actually, but wouldn't have been as funny if they busted down my door. Anyways the power here isn't too badly priced, i try to supplement as much as i can with a few solar panels that have tracking mounts. They don't put out a lot of wattage, but they help keep some of the costs down. I also needed something to put in my garden area that i don't use lol. Back on topic, does minecraft run on sparc? I guess it should considering it's written in java and solaris in pretty much all built around java. Webapps is probably exactly what i would do it initially. Your right about the threads, not sure how i got that confused. The support thing was my initial thought as well, and it's something i really don't care about (especially considering how much it would cost anyways). What i really want to do is take a project like trinity core and split the program into many multithreaded modules and scatter it across many servers. But thats a big project. I know the FPU isn't a great thing, but i don't think it has much of an effect of what i will be doing with it. At least not for $100 a server Unfortunately Ruby on Rails won't run on sparc, but Django will so that will be nice. I've been wanting to move forward with Django anyways. So in general it seems like i'm not the only one who thinks this is a good idea.
The client side needs IBMs Java VM (sth to do with the crypto used when logging in as far as I could tell, which Blackdown and the like somehow don't get right), and it loads some native components for gamepad input etc. - The server side should run on anything, afaik.
Don't you mean Oracle's (previously Sun's) Java VM? If not i haven't heard of anything Java related coming out of IBM, especially when they don't write Java. Anyways from what i gather the mine craft serve will run on anything that runs java. Considering that SPARC processors were design to run java, it should be great for it.
Interesting topic. I've always been fascinated with professional/commercial-grade electronics, and I think those servers fall into that category. By the way, in the future, try making your thread title a little more descriptive. There's no way to tell, from this title, what the thread is actually about. A more appropriate title would be something along the lines of: "Buying SPARC servers: advice needed."
Yeah, probably. I mean "whatever is the most common one on Windows". (I don't really care about open source, bloat, spyware or whatever on my Windows gaming box so I just used the first one to come along, and my last experiments with Java on my main (Linux) box were some years ago.)
I assume he means the IBM JVM, just as he said. Yes, IBM have developed their own JVM - they also have their own JDK and Java application server (WebSphere). Generally speaking, you only find it deployed in enterprise settings where the cost of the software (which is NOT cheap) is justified by the level of support they offer. So if you are building something like a trading platform and you want a messaging system you might buy IBM's MQ, then run it under WebSphere and on IBM hardware. That way, you have a single point of contact for the whole thing and if it doesn't work they will generally get it fixed quickly. A cynic might also observe that in this case there is nobody else that the vendor can attempt to blame for the problem
