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Lux, James P wrote:
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<pre wrap="">-----Original Message-----
From: Joe Landman [<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="mailto:landman@scalableinformatics.com">mailto:landman@scalableinformatics.com</a>]
Sent: Wednesday, September 17, 2008 12:54 PM
To: Robert G. Brown
Cc: David Mathog; <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:beowulf@beowulf.org">beowulf@beowulf.org</a>; Lux, James P
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Re: MS Cray
Robert G. Brown wrote:
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<pre wrap="">The real question is why an admin-rich environment with
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<pre wrap="">lots of full
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<pre wrap="">time admins would ever buy into such a deal. If you've got a full
time admin ANYWAY, paying $150/month for support on top of this
(beyond the cost of the hardware is just insane.
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<pre wrap="">Have you ever administered a lab full of these units? You
need as much help as you can get to administer the windows
machines. Sadly, while claims of there being more windows
admins are true (thats not the sad
part) you need (far) more to administer fewer windows
machines than the fewer admins needed for more Linux machines
(that is the sad part).
We have seen 2 full time admins handle 4000+ Linux machines
with time to develop software to make their lives easier
(Incyte), as compared to seeing 10 windows admins struggle to
keep 100 machines each up to date.
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<pre wrap=""><!---->
I think part of the problem in the Windows world is the incredible diversity of applications (by which I include websites with significant client side processing) that wind up being run on them. Rich growth medium, lots of spontaneous mutations.
When you get to large desktop rollouts, Windows can have fairly low admin overhead, but it's done by restricting flexibility (e.g. SMS, boot from the network, etc.) to reduce the nutritional value of the growth medium. If everyone boots the same image from the net, applying a patch to 10,000 computers is trivial. While such an environment would probably make everyone on this list exceedingly unhappy (I could guarantee there's no compiler of any kind in it..you might get a JRE, and edit your source code in MSWord), it would (and does) serve a huge number of folks in the business world perfectly well.
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Nonsense, in that line of thoughts, all that is required is to maintain
a "dev" desktop image to be served through the network. I do it with
linux with quite some ease, I see no reasons why this wouldn't be the
case under windows (meaning that once you're able to boot a network
image under windows, the mechanics of it should be trivially flexible
enough to point to differing images).
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Windows in a development intensive, HPC environment, is going to be admin expensive.
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<pre wrap="">...thinking about all those admins that never wanted to learn Linux, the _will_ have to learn something new this time!
Eric
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