Silicon Graphics Inc reckons the recent withdrawl of Sun Microsystems Inc’s TPC-D typifies the struggle the company is trying to get all of its ducks in a row at the enterprise level. Lack of a production version of Solaris 2.6 for its Starfire servers means Sun’s largest machines don’t yet support file pointers of more than 2Gb and there’s more work to do before it can deliver a usable 64-bit system everything system. Moreover, SGI believes Sun’s UFS Unix File System is fairly broken (as is Windows NT) with size of disks – 9.1Gb – now available. SGI claims its Origin 2000 ccNUMA servers are already 64-bit everything and claims its XFS file system will survive the forthcoming disks. SGI claims it can backup 1Tb data in 1 hour and that Sun tried to claim the same, but only managed around 60% of that and then claimed a rate of 1Tb per hour backup speed based on a peak achieved for part of the time. SGI said its peak was 50% higher and that its servers can read disks at 7.3Gbps on a 32-way system while Sun’s higher-priced Starfire can only achieve a theoretical 3.2Gbps maximum based upon Sbus I/O limits. SGI says it’s having good success selling high-end servers to internet service providers and doesn’t plan server platform introductions anytime soon having got all of its ccNUMA kit away last year.
