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Full Discussion: 65 thousand dollar question
The Lounge What is on Your Mind? 65 thousand dollar question Post 87119 by bakunin on Thursday 20th of October 2005 07:09:11 AM
Old 10-20-2005
Quote:
Originally Posted by mud
Thank you all for your replies.

Now I know Smilie

Still tho... 65 G's... Ouch!!! Smilie

I suspect however, that many big companies have no qualms about paying that kind of money.

Sort of like paying for a $10,000 toothpick Smilie
Not really. In big systems problems arise which are simply not present in small systems. For instance: a HDD has an average life cycle of (say) 5 years. If you build a system with one harddisk, you could expect (ov average) it to run these five years before breaking. You do not need a certain procedure for changing disks in this case. You simply take the risk of having one unplanned outage every five years.

Now suppose you have a system with several TBs diskspace and hence (again, say) 300 disks attached to it. Since all of them have a life expectency of 5 years a disk failure will happen on average every 5yrs/300, which is about once every week. In this case you need a procedure on how to change disks while the system is running or risk one unplanned outage every week.

This is why a Mac with a G5 processor costs only half as much as an Intellistation from IBM with the same processor - the difference is not only IBMs surplus factor (that too, but not only that), but also many features to make operating a data center with some thousand Intellistations *possible* (as opposed to "a complete nightmare"), unlike a datacenter with some thousand consumer-grade MacFrags with a nice design and nothing more.

This principle can be extended to software as well, but there is even another point: software is expensive to develop and cheap to sell. That means writing a program costs some effort while selling a copy of it costs nearly nothing. Hence, when you build software for some outlandish platform where you don't expect to sell many copies the price will be relatively high (very high in some cases), because it is the same effort to write the OS and sell it 100 times as it is to write it and sell it 100.000 times. Maybe the UNIX you say was some realtime OS (most Unixes aren't real-time at all) or for some extremely rare hardware (massively-parallel for instance?) or something such.

bakunin
 

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iostat(1)						      General Commands Manual							 iostat(1)

NAME
iostat - report I/O statistics SYNOPSIS
[interval [count]] DESCRIPTION
iteratively reports I/O statistics for each active disk on the system. Disk data is arranged in a four-column format: Column Heading Interpretation -------------------------------------------------- device Device name bps Kilobytes transferred per second sps Number of seeks per second msps Milliseconds per average seek If two or more disks are present, data is presented on successive lines for each disk. To compute this information, seeks, data transfer completions, and the number of words transferred are counted for each disk. Also, the state of each disk is examined times per second (as defined in and a tally is made if the disk is active. These numbers can be combined with the transfer rates of each device to determine average seek times for each device. With the advent of new disk technologies, such as data striping, where a single data transfer is spread across several disks, the number of milliseconds per average seek becomes impossible to compute accurately. At best it is only an approximation, varying greatly, based on several dynamic system conditions. For this reason and to maintain backward compatibility, the milliseconds per average seek field is set to the value 1.0. Options recognizes the following options and command-line arguments: Report terminal statistics as well as disk (or lunpath) statistics. When used with the option, lunpath and terminal statistics are displayed. Terminal statistics include: Number of characters read from terminals. Number of characters written to terminals. Percentage of time system (active processors) has spent in user mode. Percentage of time system (active processors) has spent in user mode running low-priority (nice) processes. Percentage of time system (active processors) has spent in system mode. Percentage of time system (active processors) has spent idling. interval Display successive lines which are summaries of the last interval seconds. The first line reported is for the time since a reboot and each subsequent line is for the last interval only. count Repeat the statistics count times. Report active lunpath statistics. When used with the option, lunpath and terminal statistics are reported. The lunpaths are not displayed in any specific order, and the current order may change in future releases. Lunpath data is arranged in a four-column format: symbolic name of the lunpath of the form: diskm_lunpathn, where m is the instance number of LUN and n is the instance number of lunpath. For example, in disk47_lunpath7, m is 47 and n is 7. These instance numbers are displayed by using the option for the LUN and lunpath entries. For more information on LUN and lunpath hardware path, refer to intro(7). Kilobytes transferred per second. Number of seeks per second. Milliseconds per average seek. For multiple lunpaths, data is presented on successive lines for each active lunpath. If no lunpaths were active, a blank line is printed. EXAMPLES
Show current I/O statistics for all disks: Display I/O statistics for all disks every 10 seconds until INTERRUPT or QUIT is pressed: Display I/O statistics for all disks every 10 seconds and terminate after 5 successive readings: Display I/O statistics for all disks every 10 seconds, also show terminal and processor statistics, and terminate after 5 successive read- ings: Display I/O statistics for all active lunpaths: Display I/O statistics for all active lunpaths every 10 seconds until INTERRUPT or QUIT is pressed: Display I/O statistics for all active lunpaths every 10 seconds, and terminate after 5 successive readings: Display I/O statistics for all active lunpaths every 10 seconds, also show terminal and processor statistics, and terminate after 5 succes- sive readings: WARNINGS
Users of must not rely on the exact field widths and spacing of its output, as these will vary depending on the system, the release of HP- UX, and the data to be displayed. AUTHOR
was developed by the University of California, Berkeley, and HP. FILES
SEE ALSO
vmstat(1), ioscan(1M), intro(7). iostat(1)
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