“To prove that Linux is an option in the data center using clusters, HP tested an eight-node cluster of ProLiant DL580 servers, which use the Profusion chipset co-developed by Compaq and Intel and which can scale to eight Pentium III Xeon processors in a single system. The DL580s that HP tested used the 900MHz versions of the Pentium III Xeon processors, each equipped with 2MB of L2 cache memory. Each node had 4GB of main memory, yielding a cluster with 64 processors and 128GB of main memory … The bang for the buck on this Linux cluster, which had very modest discounting, is in the same ballpark as heavily discounted enterprise Unix servers running in monolithic mode supporting one database instance.”
