Hi Alex!
On 06/09/2016 09:12 AM, Alex McWhirter wrote:
How "new" does a system have to be in order to meet these
requirements. T-5
machines are probably not too hard to come by, but the starting price
of a T-7
machine is around 40K USD IIRC.
It doesn't have to be bleeding edge technology like the M7, but just
just new
hardware in the sense that the machines have not been used for a long
time
or not used at all. I think even the absolute low-end model that
Oracle currently
offers would be more than enough to be used for Debian, it just should
be new
or at least refurbished.
The problem with the existing SPARC servers that Debian was running was
simply
that they were quite old and starting to run into issues. And if we
want to
convince the DSA team to set up new sparc64 servers, those would have
to be
new and reliable enough that they can be running for a while without
any
stability concerns.
The mentioned SPARC T5 machines would be probably perfectly fine.
Anatoly
Pugachev, who is on this list, is actually hosting such a machine which
we have
set up as a buildd (with four instances) and a porter box. The machine
runs
very stable and the integrated remote management mechanisms make it
very
easy to admin. So, these machines are ideal for Debian purposes.
I guess we could probably convince DSA to use T5 machines if someone
were
to donate these as long these particular machines have not seen too
much
usage yet. I actually don't think that even T5 machines that have seen
some use already would be in anyway problematic. This kind of
enterprise
hardware is usually built like a tank.
Adrian