UNC Asheville is a liberal arts university currently supporting a
diverse user community (students, faculty, and staff) with a VAX
4000/300 system running VMS. This system is stressed out right now and
we are contemplating the AlphaServer 1000 4/200 running OSF/1 as an
alternative to support many of the users and applications currently
running on the VAX 4000/300 under VMS.
Our Computer Science Department already has some Alpha 3000
workstations which, for the most part, they are pleased with.
The system will be used to run character based applications,
predominately: pine/pico for email, tin for news, lynx for WWW access,
ftp, and telnet. There would be little, if any, X applications save
for the console in the beginning.
We would also be running several servers: httpd, gopherd and the
Qualcomm pop server. We'll also be running majordomo.
We would like to gradually migrate our user community to OSF/1 but are
concerned with the number of concurrent users we'd be able to
support. I read some marketing materials where Digital indicates that
the AlphaServer is the "top-of-the-line and suits the needs of a
... higher education institution that requires high availability and
room to grow." Naturally, this sounds like your typical marketing
hype.
What I'd really appreciate is some feedback from institutions that
have an AlphaServer running some (or all) of the above
applications. I'd also be interested to know how many concurrent users
you service comfortably, and at what point response time becomes
unacceptable. I'd like to hear of other application software you found
to be very popular, if any.
I'd also be very interested in any suggestions, "gotchas" to watch out
for, supplementary hardware that people found essential/desireable,
problems, horror stories, and of course, satisfied customer
testimonials.
Our environment has multiple hardware and software platforms, so I'd
also be interested to know about interoperability problems or success
stories.
Thanks!
Bob Benites
benites_at_cs.unca.edu
Received on Tue Mar 14 1995 - 10:08:58 NZDT