[thelist] (Intel + Linux) vs (Sun + Solaris)

[Mo Martin]

We're running into capacity limits on our web hardware and my head
technical guy is suggesting a switch from Solaris running on Sun
hardware to Linux running on Intel processors. I trust him but want
some additional opinions.

It's a mid-sized corporate site serving about a million visitors a
month. 4M pages a month about 50-75% of which are fed from the
database. Steady, predictable growth but quite rapid -- more than
doubling each year. The site serves pages and data sheets, no
transactions or e-commerce.

We run three Solaris machines (Sun CPUs) now but one does all the
work. It runs Sybase 7 and Cold Fusion 4.5, and Apache. It's a
three-year-old old machine with dual 330 MHz processors. The other
machines are single-processor 300 MHz versions just serving HTML,
mail, and PDFs. One also runs Lyris, a list server, at fairly low
volume. All the machines are at a co-lo -- we own and run them, they
house them and provide bandwidth.

The choice is between buying a newer Sun server and RAID array; or
going with a 2.2 GHz Pentium 4 with RAID array for around $4500.

He also is suggesting we consolidate our processes. We have Cold
Fusion and Sybase on one machine; and two separate machines sharing
the HTML serving and mail functions. He wants to put it all on one
box (and use the old boxes as spares/backups).

Primary desire is for reliability and performance.

Thoughts?