Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 02:24:34 -0700 (MST) From: Valence Logrus <valence@symboliq.org> To: Haikal Saadh <wyldephyre2@yahoo.com> Cc: "'Trish Lynch'" <trish@bsdunix.net>, "'Chris Coleman'" <chrisc@vmunix.com>, <advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: Hotmail _still_ runs FreeBSD! Message-ID: <20011217013906.G72797-100000@arctic.icelab.net> In-Reply-To: <003401c1856f$fd1c9f20$90c801ca@warhawk>
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I can't go into all the specifics obviously but here are a few generalities anyhow: Last contract started: Mid-1997 Renewed several times since then, covering approximately 25+ sites where the machines are located More than 300 machine total under contract support, ~80% are E4500s The rest is storage in the form of D130s and T3s from Sun approximately 75% T3s, 25% D130s There were quite a few E3000s in use awhile back, but those have made way for E4500s As for the new line of "midframe" machines from Sun, I'm sure there is quite an order about to be placed to replace the older E4500s, but that won't happen for at least a year or more I suspect. Sorry I can't be more specific on the details as I happen to like my job. Solaris is pretty nasty when you start poking around in the code, but it works, and works pretty well all things considered. There is still quite a bit of BSD code left in Solaris, most people forget about the influence Bill Joy had on early sunos development. Believe it or not, several major contributions to Solaris by developers working for Sun have made their way into FreeBSD, for instance, the slab allocator. This may be way off in my short years, I am by no means a Donald Knuth type person, but I really doubt Exchange could be tweaked enough to handle Hotmail, if that was the case don't you suspect Monkeysoft would have already done that? There is a reason they use Sun en masse, intel based machines just don't scale as well as a SPARC based machine can. Sun uses technology straight out of Cray's wonderful development thinktanks, take a look at the SunFire 6800. You can pack 106 UltraSPARCs in this thing and up to 576GB of ram, ever see an Intel box that large? NT isn't being ported to any other platforms at the moment, and I doubt Scott McNealy would want NT on a SPARC , so forget about that nightmare. With as much rhetoric and slams on Bill that Scott comes up with, it's got to just burn Monkeysoft up that they have n other choice but to run Hotmail on Sun equipment. As flaky as that might sound, there is quite a rivalry between the two, and for pride's sake I'd say Bill really hates the fact their own crappy software can't take the load, that they must bow down in secret to Sun. Secret is out I guess though, ain't it :) -Real Geeks Like Their Women Rack Mounted On Sat, 15 Dec 2001, Haikal Saadh wrote: =AD=AD=BB Do tell :) Or are you sworn to secrecy? =AD=AD=BB To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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