Re:so they'll use grep ??? (Score 1)

Your understanding of Sun Enterprise class systems is clearly lacking, as is your understanding of production level networks.

Scanning for data in real time when you're looking at several near-full gigabit lines isn't exactly trival, and the more keywords to search on, the harder it gets.

The advantage of a Sun system with a fair number of CPUs is that each IO board can have dedicated CPUs handling it to make sure that the process that's doing the work never blocks waiting for IO, CPU or both (remember kids, handling IO requires cycles, and blocking on CPU is bad when you're trying for soft realtime).

Of course, there are other problems as well. The network card drivers have to be able to keep up (remember kids, that needs CPU cycles as well). You have to watch that the system is balanced in terms of how fast you write IO to memory, and how fast you process what's in memory and flush it to disk (gee Billy, that takes CPU as well).

In short, if you're just grepping through mail spools, you're more likely to be disk IO bound, though there are high-end tricks for getting around that by making it more CPU bound, and adding more CPUs. If you're decoding packets in real-time off the wire on multiple gigabit networks, you're bound to network IO, which is bound to the CPUs.