Rack Mount Servers

[Ken Ambrose]

On Sun, 11 Aug 2002 kurth at usaexpress.net wrote:

> I'm just tired of the limits of the x86 line....640k,8gb.....why don't manf
> take into account that just because a 10Tb drive dosen't exist today, one
> will exist with 6 or 8 months...and plan.....no, that's too simple....

While I am in -no- way defending some of the dain-bramaged decisions that
brought about today's PCs:

1) SCSI, regardless of platform, just wouldn't care.
2) With the ATA/133 spec (48-bit address space), you can go up to 131072
   TERABYTES before you run into problems (2^48*512 block).  I imagine
   we will hit it someday.  I ain't holdin' my breath on that one.
   Something that can hold every movie I've ever seen, uncompressed,
   in a -fraction- of its total capacity is when I actually think
   demand for bigger drives will begin to slacken.  ;-)
3) 640 K is an 8088 limitation that DOS/Windows kept alive until
   (more or less) Windows 3.0.  After the '286, though, "real" OSen
   stopped having that problem.

Does this mean I think X-86 is the be-all end-all?  No.  Do I think its
price:performance ratio wins out over most other platforms?  Yes.
Especially if AMD's Hammer makes it big in 64-bit land.  Are there
advantages that Sparc and Alpha systems have (eg. their console modes)
that I wish X-86 had?  Sure thing.  My servers will nevertheless remain
X-86, and inexpensive, and not tied to a single CPU vendor's whims.

$.02,

-Ken