[Benchmarking] Press Release about the Benchmarking?

Sun Aug 23 16:49:20 EDT 2009

All, and ESRI in particular,

As FOSS4G chair, I'm keen to put out a press release announcing some of 
the early details about the Benchmarking project, as I expect it will 
attract delegates to the conference.

The theme for FOSS4G this year is "User Driven", which means making 
tools work for the user. In particular, this means making sure that Free 
tools can integrate with proprietary tools.

For the press release I suggest mentioning:

* Outline what is involved in the benchmarking tests
* Mention the history
* Who is involved this year
* Some quotes
ESRI saying something like: "Arc GIS server integrates well with Open 
Source. It runs on Red Hat Linux, can connect to Open Source databases, 
and interacts with clients through Open Standards. We see the 
benchmarking as a way to show how ESRI integrates well with other systems."

Mapserver/Geoserver: "Past benchmarking tests have led to (major?) 
improvements in different areas of our code ..."

* Finish with general details about FOSS4G.

--

Can I please get some feedback from the participating parties to give 
this the go-ahead.
Satish, in particular, I'm interested to hear comment from ESRI.

If we get the go-ahead, we can start building the press release in the 
wiki here:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSS4G_2009_Press_Releases

Paul Ramsey wrote:
> Joel,
>
> I'm away tomorrow morning, so I hereby turn over the issue to you :)
> If you convert the machine to RHEL, please preserve the /opt directory
> somehow or other, so that the PostGIS/PostgreSQL/Mapserver software
> downloads, build scripts, etc, I spent my time on don't disappear.
>
> Everyone else,
>
> Time is of the essence! Decide on the tests and get them up and
> running sooner than later!
>
> Off to the beach,
>
> Paul
>
> On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 3:15 PM, Schlagel, Joel D
> IWR<Joel.D.Schlagel at usace.army.mil> wrote:
>   
>> I think we should do all we can to support ESRI participation.  Mike and I
>> can support reconfiguring the host environment if the ms and gs teams can
>> handle re-install of their software
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> -joel
>>
>>
>> ---------
>> Sent via BB
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: benchmarking-bounces at lists.osgeo.org
>> <benchmarking-bounces at lists.osgeo.org>
>> To: benchmarking at lists.osgeo.org <benchmarking at lists.osgeo.org>
>> Cc: ichivite at esri.com <ichivite at esri.com>; ebader at esri.com
>> <ebader at esri.com>; ssankaran at esri.com <ssankaran at esri.com>
>> Sent: Fri Aug 21 16:50:16 2009
>> Subject: Fwd: [Benchmarking] ESRI Participation
>>
>> 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
>>>
>>>
>>>       
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>>     
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