I will say that another option is to use Solaris x86..which I find to be far
more stable
under heavy load (no difference under light load) for LDM/McIDAS/GEMPAK
decoders.
Sun is fully supporting it now and is FINALLY optimizing it for speed on
x86, those
changes should be available early next year.
The OS can be downloaded for $20, with a 1 CPU commercial license for $99,
and
a 2 CPU commercial license for $250, with patches freely available for the
next 7 years
or so until Solaris 9 is EOL'ed.
Unfortunately Sun still doesn't quite get the idea of low-cost computing and
refused
to consider supporting internal HW RAID. They insisted on selling their
expensive external HW RAID solution, or now their expensive FC solution.
They finally see the light and are working with Adaptec and LSI to get HW
RAID card
drivers released for Solaris x86, but that won't be till early next year I
imagine. Probably
too late for many here.
I know Unidata pretty much gave up on Solaris x86 (they are big FreeBSD fans
now), as
many of you have...but it's another option. Too bad Sun wasted all those
years by ignoring
x86 and treating it's customers badly.
Robert Mullenax
Weather Systems Administrator
Universal Weather and Aviation
