Server platform comparison

[Roderick A Gammon]

Thanks folks!  I am glad to learn that linux-competent labor is expected to
increase at UH.  That is really a big concern.  Double thanks, Warren, for
pointing out that ICS is adopting thin clients etc.  I'll call around for
stats.

As for peak needs, I really don't know.  Probably not a consistent need, ala
e-commerce, but at certain times it could get intense.  E.g. 'rush hour'
before a conference.  I'll try and get some data.

For database servers on non-linux platforms, it would probably be whatever
'comes with the package'- Access or whatever on Windows for example.

As to Postgres/MySQL- Transactions are probably not too important.  As I
understand it, transactions are mainly for input.  Input would be done by
student hires or admin staff, and not that many workers at any one time.
I'm pretty sure that credit card handling for conferences, as an example,
would not be done.  At least not in the next 18 months, at which time the
dbs will have evolved one hopes.  So most clients will be retrieving data
only (e.g. prospective students).

Postgres is my choice simply for its UTF8 and other encoding support.  I
have had fantastic sucess with it in corpus research projects.  CCS will at
least have to mix English and Mandarin.  Taiwanese, Japanese, Korean,
Vietnamese etc. are not out of the question.  So I'd like to see them use a
UTF8 db to ease growing pains as more natural languages are added into the
data.

Probably Oracle is out of the question- for one thing the licensing is going
to be too confusing.  CCS simply has better things to do than consider how
mHz affect grant apportioning.  Same can be said for the new MS licenses,
perhaps.

As for Mac OXS- there may be an urge to have the server also as a
workstation.  Personally I'd reccomend against it.  But I'm not the final
say.  But the big appeal, it seems, is simply that CCS has used Macs for a
long time.  It's like a business that wants to keep using MS- it's simply a
matter of brand comfort, an understandable and human impulse.

I'm still looking for TCO data for all platforms, I'll post when found or
collated.  I am convinced of a linux system- probably $2K could bring in
real heavyweight stuff without even busting software costs on a Win2K
platform.  But I owe at least an attempt at impartiality.

Thank you!
Rod Gammon
____________________________________________

President, AEG, Inc.     | PhD. Candidate
Tools for multi-lingual  | Chinese Computational Linguistics
information processing.  | University of HI @ Manoa
http://www.aeg-inc.net   | http://www.aeg-inc.net/cuttingEdge