About a month ago I posted a question asking for users experiences and
opinions with these two platforms (was posted in sun-managers as well)
and what course of action they would take if they had it to do over
again.
There was no overwhelming response favoring either side. Secondly, as
mentioned before, very little could be said from experience to support
their decisions other than personal opinion. All I can do is explain
which platform we decided to go with and why.
The considerations that were included were
o cost (hardware and software)
- The dec (alphastation 255) outperformed the sun closest to it
in price (sun sparc 5) by a considerable margin. It also outperforms
our sparc 20 multi-processor for 3 times the money!
- The operating system with two user license was included. We needed
unlimited users. The solaris workgroup option is a nominal cost
while dec wants about $6000 for their unlimited user. We have
been able to get a competitive price on the dec os unlimited user
in light of this fact!
o speed (throughput, response time),
- The dec simply outperforms the sun for number crunching power
and more important in this situation, response time
- Apparently, dec has included many of the real-time extensions
from its real-time unix into digital unix. this makes for excellent
response time which is key for WWW servers. The solaris server
is much worse even though it has twice the memory and half the load
o ease of installation and upgrade,
- The solaris machines do install pretty easy. The dec came
preloaded with du 3.2d and we had to fall back on our media
distribution of 3.2c because we needed to move the system disk
around onto another several disks. the 3.2d that came on the dec
was rather botched. I blaim this on the fact that since the os came
installed, they had to install all options.
o integratability,
- no problem running 3.2d and solaris 2.3 side-by-side. one of
our dec's is the nis master server, news server, radius server,
and nfs server and no one complains!
o available software (commercial, porting internal software)
- porting software to du is a nice experience. librarys and
headers are thoughtfully laid out to accomodate both bsd and sysv
programming interfaces. solaris provides compatbility libraries
but they are unwieldy and porting is difficult
- secondly, du comes with its own compiler!
- also liked lsm which comes with a basic set of features and
advfs on the dec
- it doesn't seem however, that du has caught on for commercial
software as much as solaris or even some bsd variants. I am
referring to low scale software not larger commercial packages
- the only problem we have with porting inhouse written software
was going from gcc to dec cc because our coders have been getting
lazy with what gcc lets you get by on and the difference between byte
ordering and size of pointers
I hope this helps some people make more informed decisions in the future!
- Brad block
Received on Sat May 04 1996 - 13:14:27 NZST