Fwd: [Benchmarking] ESRI Participation

[Paul Ramsey]

Benchmarkers,

Since GeoWeb, I have been talking with ESRI about joining the
benchmarking round this year, but we are having some issue wrt
platform, which are detailed below. Open question is basically, "can
we change OS at this point" from a convenience PoV. We need a decision
from our group on that ASAP to help ESRI get to their own decision
about participation.

Can someone volunteer to be the main point-of-contact with ESRI for
the next two weeks? I am going to the beach on Sunday and will be out
of contact until Labour Day.

Thanks,

Paul

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ismael Chivite <ichivite at esri.com>
Date: Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 11:47 AM
Subject: RE: [Benchmarking] ESRI Participation
To: "pramsey at cleverelephant.ca" <pramsey at cleverelephant.ca>, Satish
Sankaran <ssankaran at esri.com>
Cc: Eric Bader <ebader at esri.com>


Paul,

 My name is Ismael Chivite, I work with Satish in the ArcGIS Server
Product Management team. I just wanted to share some thoughts
regarding ESRI's participation in the map service benchmark report for
the upcoming FOSS4G conference.

 We are certainly very interested in participating in this exercise.
It is a good opportunity to see where these technologies stand from a
performance point of view, which ultimately is going to help all of us
improve our products to serve our users better.

 Satish facilitated to me a description of the tests that have been
proposed and the 'rules of engagement'. One of the topics that may put
us out of the game is the fact that you want to use a particular
version of Linux which we do not support.  While I agree that CentOS
is virtually no different than RHL, the fact is that we (ESRI) do not
certify ArcGIS Server on CentOS. My concern running on CentOS is not
coming from the technical side, but from the support side. I
understand that people (users) are going to look at the results of
this benchmark. I do not want to send a message out there in which we
promote the use of an operating system that we do not certify. I
assure you that if we do that we will get right away tech support
calls from users, which is the last thing I want as an outcome of our
participation in this exercise.

 So in essence, and as much as we want to participate on this, we
(ESRI) will need to step aside unless we run on RHL or other
environment that we currently support. Since technically the operating
systems (RHL and CentOS) are almost identical, I wonder if you would
be willing to either run all tests on this OS, or at least allow ESRI
to run on it.  I believe that the second scenario could be perfectly
valid as long as people are made aware of the differences between
CentOS and RHL. I would like to ask you to consider these options.

 Finally, I also wanted you to know that I would be more than happy to
provide the hardware environment for this benchmark as well. We do
have some 8 core Dell 1950s available that we could use for this
purpose.  If we need to, we could allow the different participants to
log into our servers and own them for the duration of the benchmark.

 Thanks for your time,


Ismael Chivite
ArcGIS Server Product Manager
ESRI
http://www.esri.com




-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Ramsey [mailto:pramsey at cleverelephant.ca]
Sent: Wednesday, August 19, 2009 11:57 AM
To: Satish Sankaran
Subject: Re: [Benchmarking] ESRI Participation

Actually, getting a little pushback now (since doing RHEL means
starting all the other prep work again from scratch). Your folks are
certain Centos5 is not possible? (I mean, it's not like we are going
to be putting in support calls over this, there's "unsupported" and
then there's "doesn't work".)

P.

On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 1:20 PM, Satish Sankaran<ssankaran at esri.com> wrote:
>       Bear with me as I try to work this one internally here. Here's a reply
> from our linux guy on what we (ArcGIS Server) would need. Will you guys be
> OK with this?
>
> Red Hat 5 updates are supported.  ArcGIS Server can be installed on the
> latest update (5.3).
>
> The System Requirements page
> (http://wikis.esri.com/wiki/display/ag93bsr/ArcGIS+Server+Operating+System+Requirements+and+Limitations#ArcGISServerOperatingSystemRequirementsandLimitations-Linux
>
> ) also lists out specific (32-bit) packages that need to be installed on the
> RHEL 5 machine prior to installing ArcGIS Server
>
>