Hello folks,
Thanks to all those who took the time and trouble
to reply to my question. Apologies for delay in
summary.
Best wishes,
Paddy
Paddy Croskery
Computer Centre
Queens University
Belfast
NI
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Original question:
At Queen's University, we are evaluating tenders for systems to
run INGRES-based management information systems.
One of the serious contenders is Alpha 2100 running under OSF/1.
Can anyone comment on the reliability of OSF/1.
Comments on performance would also be welcome.
The other contender is Sparc20/Solaris , so if anyone has any comments
on the relative merits of these solutions we are keen to listen.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Responses:
---------------------------------------------------------------
From: Alan Oborne <scoaco_at_thor.cf.ac.uk>
We've been running an ALPHA 2100 with OSF/1 since last
year. It replaces our 5830. Primarily it is a time-share system
(we've had up to 80 users on simultaneously although the machine is sized
for 120+) and we also run the ORACLE database on it. This is a stand-alone
system and not part of DECathena.
As regards problems with OSF/1, we've experienced very few and the
hardware is also reliable. We have a few other ALPHA's running OSF/1
around the Campus and they also have been relatively trouble-free.
As reagards ALPHA vs the larger SUNs I think the ALPHA gives more
bang-per-buck, although you will find that stuff gets ported to OSF
slower than SUNOS/SOLARIS.
---------------------------------------------------------------
From: haymanR_at_icefog.uacn.alaska.edu
We are implementing an 86 Gb (43 RZ28s) system here on a DEC 7000-620 and an
Alphaserver(aka 2100) utilizing Oracle as our base. We have had no problems
with reliability of the systems. I'm very happy with them. Only one instance
of unplanned downtime in the last year and that was due to a disk getting a
media format failure, we brought the system back up and made a backup of the
disk before it failed completely. We're now running RAID level 5 on our SA800,
so we don't expect even that to cause unplanned downtime in the future.
These Alpha systems are great!
---------------------------------------------------------------
From: Selden E Ball Jr <SEB_at_LNS62.LNS.CORNELL.EDU>
If you want "reliability", you can't run unix.
You have to define what you mean by that term, though.
VMS (with POSIX) would be much better by most definitions.
---------------------------------------------------------------
From: Brad Krebs <brad_at_EECS.Berkeley.EDU>
I have been running OSF/1 on a number of different Alpha
platforms ( 2100, 3000/400, 7000, 3000/500, 2000/300 ) for
as long as OSF/1 has been available from DEC. In fact, we
field tested the product before it was first made available
to the public and I was quite surprised at the stability of
the OS from day one. We were only able to crash the OS once
when we first installed it and were not able to crash it
since ( on purpose ). There have been a few crashes over the
years, but none of these prevented us from doing our research
and DEC has been very responsive in fixing the problems. I am
very impressed and pleased with the stability and robustness of
DEC's OSF/1.
---------------------------------------------------------------
From: Simon Lai <sjlai_at_broncho.ct.monash.edu.au>
We are running OSF/1 V3.0. We have never had a crash. Although our
consistent load is not high we have wild fluctuations in the number and
type of jobs we run. Sometimes the machine can be idle all day, at other
times it won't have a CPU microsecond spare for weeks. We have 9 alphas
all together (mostly 300/300LX workstations and a 3000/500 server).
> The other contender is Sparc20/Solaris , so if anyone has any comments
> on the relative merits of these solutions we are keen to listen.
I have both used/run solaris and heard about it on the net. I've
heard that 2.4 is "better" but the size of the patch tapes still worries
me (2 x 60 Mb!!).
---------------------------------------------------------------
From: Dirk Grunwald <grunwald_at_foobar.cs.colorado.edu>
My OSF/1 V2 system would stay up for 30+ days at a time.
We recently installed V3.0, it seems stable as well.
You should look at the DECSafe software as well, very nice fail-over.
From: Cameron Strom <syscrs_at_devetir.qld.gov.au>
> One of the serious contenders is Alpha 2100 running under OSF/1.
We have two dual processor 2100's, both with 512Mb memory. They both
run Oracle databases and OSF/1 3.0.
> The other contender is Sparc20/Solaris
We also have a plethora of Sun SPARC 10's and 20's, ranging from single
processor model 41's to dual processor model 61's. All of these systems
run Ingres. They all run Solaris 2.2 or 2.3.
---------------------------------------------------------------
From: jim_at_orac.ecc.tased.edu.au
We have a statewide library system. We currently run 450 users and expect to run
700-800 users. It's a 4720 (2 cpu's) with 768Mb of RAM and 48Gb of disk.
Response time is excellent. Unplanned downtime has been of the order of 6 hours
in the last 18 months. Three of those hours was my fault and a further 30 min
was due to a power failure.
We mirror most drives using LSM and run the Advanced File System (I highly
recommend this product!!!)
---------------------------------------------------------------
From: chu_at_musp0.jpl.nasa.gov (Eugene Chu)
There have been various discussions of bugs in the OSF/1 operating system,
and how DEC has patched them up or fixed them in newer releases. How they
affect you will depend on how you use your system. Unfortunately, I can't
give you all the details about them. I can tell you about one of our
experiences with a Sparc20 and a Sparc 1000 server and Solaris. We installed
these back in October of 1994, and they exhibited various bugs and the
occassional system panics. We got several patches from Sun that were
supposed to fix various problems, but appearantly not ours. It wasn't
until January of this year that we found out that Sun has 2 versions of
Solaris 2.3, one released in mid 1994m and another released in November.
Both were called "Solaris 2.3", yet only the later release would work
on the Sparc 20 and Sparcserver 1000. So, if you choose to go with the
Sun systems, be aware of this little ditty. I hear that Solaris 2.4 has
just been released, which is supposed to be a single version, and fixes
a lot of bugs in 2.3.
---------------------------------------------------------------
From: huhman_at_ee.deere.com (Stan Huhman#HuhmanJohn Deere EW)
I know where I'd put my money, and it would not be with Sun. We run at this
time 8 Alpha boxes with OSF/1. Never have I jad any reason to say the OS
is unreliable. I have no direct experience with Solaris, but I have
read many articles about problems with it.
---------------------------------------------------------------
From: Andy Phillips <atp_at_mssly1.mssl.ucl.ac.uk>
We use OSF/1 here. We will be moving to mainly OSF/1 soon.
What scare stories have you heard? Please let me know any good
ones.
Our experience has been
OSF/1 1+ years from 1.3->2.1 (expecting to upgrade to 3.2)
SunOS 4.1.3 3+ years
Solaris <1 years (what a mess...)
> Comments on performance would also be welcome, but it is more the
> reliability than concerns us.
Well OSF/1 + alpha beats everything except linux on price/performance.
Almost without fail, anything that compiles on SunOS will compile on
OSF, (but not vice versa) -- which is important for us. Few reliability
problems. Spontaneous crash rate appears to be about the same or less
than SunOS 4.1.3. In my experience of course. Hardware seems capable
of taking our decidedly flaky power environment. Filesystems include
the crash-resistant advanced file system, which is really nice, and
is probably worth the price of an OSF license alone.
---------------------------------------------------------------
From: Scooter Morris <scooter_at_kansas.gene.com>
At Genentech, we have found OSF/1 to be extremely stable...do you
know under what circumstances the "scare" stories relate to?? We have
2 7000's, 1 4000, 2 2100's and several 3000's. By the way OSF/1 3.2 is
out and quality is quite high.
---------------------------------------------------------------
From: Bill Bathurst <bathurst_at_corona.pmel.noaa.gov>
We are an OSF/Solaris shop. I would have to say we are quite satisfied
with OSF 3.0 and Solaris 2.4.
We did run into a lot of problems with Solaris 2.1-2.3 and OSF 1.3. In my
opinion all of the above revs were not quite stable. So far OSF 3.0 and
Solaris 2.4 have been quite good. We run large models and run ingress.
The Sparc compilers have been _extremely_ sub par for ingress developement.
I don't know if you be doing any imbedded sql or not.
Dec maintenance seems to be about 50% more expensive than comparable
Sun software maintenance.
> Comments on performance would also be welcome, but it is more the
> reliability than concerns us.
I think you will find reliability to be the same.
OSF 3.0 has much better NFS performance than Solaris 2.0 since it uses NFS
version 3.0 where Solaris uses 2.0. We find a threefold level of
performance increase there.
Our DEC alphas tend to be 3x as fast running our models.
> The other contender is Sparc20/Solaris , so if anyone has any comments
> on the relative merits of these solutions we are keen to listen.
The Sparc 20 is a very nice machine. As a desktop machine I find the Sparc
to be the superior machine, software wise. Dec has the speed far and above
any Sparc around.
---------------------------------------------------------------
From: =?iso-8859-1?Q?=22Helleb=F8_Knut=22?= <bgk1142_at_bggfu2.nho.hydro.com>
I would say both i/o and CPU power should go in Alpha's favour (the 2100
running the PCI bus). I wouldn't worry too much about stability either, if
you get the INGRES version based on DECOSF/1 3.0. I don't know if it's
useable on OSF/1 3.2, but my guess is yes and 3.2 is rumoured to run faster
than 3.0.
---------------------------------------------------------------
From: rusb_at_redac.co.uk (Russ Bevan)
We are familiar and support all main Unix Platforms with our
applications ... Sun SunOS and Solaris, HP HP-UX 9.0.X, Digital Ultrix,
Digital Alpha OSF/1
The flavour of the year amongst our developers is Alpha with OSF/1 3.0.2
Main features they like are :-
Advanced FileSystem - We can have really big filesystems from
little 300MB disks !
The Speed
What they don't like
The Windowing Environment, so we are running COSE (CDE) instead.
As for Sun, Sparc 20 will give same performance as a low end Alpha,
and you'll need a number of major patches to Solaris 2.3 or Solaris 2.4 for
correct NFS support etc.
The only problem we had with Alpha is that we get very poor
performance unless we link our applications with "cc -nonshared" when they
absolutly fly.
I would suggest if you want a non-risk option, then look at the
HP9000/700 range.
---------------------------------------------------------------
From: Drew Kramer <drew_at_ny.ox.com>
>There are some scare stories circulating about the reliability of OSF/1.
>Can anyone comment on this, or put me in contact
>with sites which use it, preferably in a time-sharing or any database
>environment? Positive and negative experiences would be appreciated.
I've run OSF/1 since version 1.2 in a multi-user time-sharing database
environment. I would say it is superior to HP/UX, Solaris, and AIX in its
ability to handle large numbers of simultanious users (I've had over 500 on a
DEC 7000) There were a few problems with version 1.2 that were fixed in 1.3.
Version 2.1 of OSF/1 has been *very* stable for me, and now that version 3.2 is
out, I'm going to upgrade to that sometime in the near future. Some of the
"reliability" scare stories may be related to the fact that OSF/1 being a
relativly new operating system has some features that were not well understood.
A prime example of this is are the two methods of swap space allocation. I'd be
willing to give you a rundown of the things that I would adjust on an OSF/1
system used for time-sharing, and I'm sure others on this list would be as well.
---------------------------------------------------------------
From: Dan Stromberg - OAC-CSG <strombrg_at_hydra.acs.uci.edu>
There are scare stories about both OS's, but the worst stories are
about Solaris 2.x.
We have a pretty solid Solaris 2.4 environment here. We have a just
beginning OSF/1 3.[02] environment.
In other words, I can speak from experience that Solaris 2.4 can work
very well. I don't know for certain if OSF/1 can or not, but it looks
like it could.
Contrary to the stories, there are a lot of things that port quite
easily to Solaris 2.4 at this time. There are a number that port
nicely to OSF/1 also, but I believe I'm still seeing easier porting
with the Sun's.
---------------------------------------------------------------
From: Henk Mos <H.J.Mos_at_fys.ruu.nl>
No experiences with databases here, but we are using a model 4000/610,
running OSF/1 2.1 (soon 3.2)
for general purpose interactive work so time-sharing is important.
The machine is configured with 512 Mb memory and is used by > 300 different
persons every day. Average simultaneous logins is about 150.
All kinds of work is done. Communication, program development etc.
Stability is very good. There has been one kernel problem but DEC
supplied a patch. No problems since. As long as not everybody starts f77 at
the same time interactive response is ok :-)
We also have 15 Alpha stations and they show the same behavior.
Compared to let's say SUNOS 4.1.3 reliability is good (but I'm not
sure if that's a compliment...)
---------------------------------------------------------------
From: sanghvi_at_proto.wilm.ge.com (arun sanghvi)
We have been running ALPHA machine for last 2 years with
uoto 300 users running Oracle based applications. The
hardware is reliable.
---------------------------------------------------------------
From: Andrew "T." Lloyd <atlloyd_at_acer.gen.tcd.ie>
You will see from the footer that we are the Irish
node of EMBnet (The european molecular biology network)
a number of the 26 national nodes run OSF/1 including
us. We have a AXP 3000 600 96 MB 12 GB and chose that
platform because it gave excellent value comapred to
Suns wrt bangs for bucks. It was a risk because then
(a couple of yaers ago) it was defo a minority platform.
But I've not had cause to regret going with OSF/1. I've
had my share of problems (getting programs to compile,
strange crashes, necessity to patch bits and bobs, but
it seems to clank away and has not really let us down
yet. Roy Omond at ebi.ac.uk in Hinxton has a number
(four) OSF boxes and he really is a database environment.
(European BioInformatics Institute).
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Received on Thu Apr 06 1995 - 12:43:57 NZST