Academic workstations -- Followups to comp.unix.questions ONLY

[Dirk Grunwald]

>> Bad guess, go measure it, because servers almost always have faster
>> disks, controllers and bigger disk buffers remote disks are usually

This isn't really true, you know, unless you always buy the most up to
date controller. Smaller disks get better faster, and your incremental
cost is much much lower.

E.g., we have two CDC Sabre drives, 741 controller serving a 3/260. Total
cost at the time (university discounts, etc), about $27,000 for everything,
and we get about 650Mb of storage plus a fast central server if you need
compute-bound jobs (although extensive use of the server slows down everyone
else). The disk has about 1.5Mb/second transfer and 16ms seek

You can buy SCSI CDC Wren-V's that have 1Mb/second transfer rates & 16ms seek
for about $2500. Pick up 10 of those for your 10 clients that you can
serve off the 3/260 & you get 6000Mb of storage, and you still have enough
left over to buy a 2Gb tape backup system.

You get system redundancy (i.e. if a disk croaks, make that station be
a client of another), higher aggregate throughput and 10x the storage.
You don't have the central server, but hey, that can be an advantage
since you can now mix & mach your configuration (i.e. you want 10 stations,
now you have have 5 Sun/i386 stations & 5 DEC-3100's).

--
Dirk Grunwald -- Univ. of Illinois 		  (grunwald at flute.cs.uiuc.edu)