In-Reply-To: <950512180858_116723111@aol.com>
Message-ID: 
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Status: O
X-Status: 


On Fri, 12 May 1995 Dougatlake@aol.com wrote:

> >This gives you the equivalent of a 3090/200J (sold for $6 >million each
> in1991).
> 
> I'm shockeddddddddddd!
> 
> But what about the Sysop? How much for one of them thar brainy people!

Oh, if only it could have been ONE!  We needed 5 Sys Admins, 3 DBAs, 12 
operators, 5 guys to move tapes around, and 125 programmers just to plug 
the leaks everytime a new release of anything (from us OR IBM) came out.

We were squirming at the prospect of paying $250,000 for a Pyramid, until
the SysOps in Winnepeg told us they wanted $30,000,000 for software 
upgrades. :-) :-) 8-).  The VP didn't want to be known as the 30 million 
dollar woman :-)

> (I'm in the middle of a rampup of a hundred real estate listings to a WWW
> site we made a deal with. But I guess I could create my own site with
> hyper-text linking, GIF, and all that good stuff. Amazing!)

You may want to seriously consider that.  The biggest cost of the whole 
operation will be scanning the house pictures, scanning/keying the 
discriptions for the first pass.  Once that's done, you may want to 
replicate the content and farm it out to multiple servers.

I gave someone the recipie for the equivilant of a 3090/600J (running AIX)
as 2 P/100s, 2 SCSI cards/server, each card driving 3 1-gig SCSI drives, 
an ethernet card connected directly to a CISCO router/csu/dsu to a t1 link.
A second ethernet rail can provide secure load balancing and replication.
And of course, a Linux operating system (SCO or SysVR4 are also nice, but 
lately, there has been about 10,000 man/hours worth of kernal tuning on 
Linux.  For a while, Linus was putting out the "release of the week".
It is extremely stable now.  I've been using Slackware 2.1 and getting
excellent results.

Several former Novell Execs are offering "Commercial Linux" under the
brand name "Caldera".  This could be an interesting summer. :-).

> Doug.
> 

	Rex Ballard
	Standard & Poor's/McGraw-Hill
	Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect
	the Management of the McGraw-Hill Companies.




From rballard@cnj.digex.net Tue May 16 00:04:31 1995