by I have to administrate a network which consists of 3 Sparc 4, 2 Sparc 10,
3 Sparc 5, 3 Sparc 20 and 2 Ultrasparc workstations. Some of the faster
workstations have 100MBit Ethernet card.
The workstations are used for CAD applications. The size of the data files
is up to 450 MB.
At now we using one of the two Sparc 10 with 6 4GB Wide-Differenitial
Barrucuda harddisks (which a mirrored with ODS) as file server.
Today I run some simple benchmarks (Bonnie and tcpblast) and it seems I
could get a great performance gain, if I would use one of the Ultrasparcs
as file server :-).
But the users with the 450 MB parts wouldn't be very happy, if I would steal
them one of the nice machines, which we bought for them.
Do you think, it's a good idea to use the fastest workstation as
file server, or is a 712 Sparc20 or a 110 MHz Sparc5 good enough for this task?
I don't know, if the cpu speed is critical for a file server.
Does anyone made expiriences with a PC under Solaris x86 or FreeBSD
used as file server?
Thank you very much for any hints
Jan