> In March you wrote to the alpha-osf-managers user group asking for
> any information on the comparison between Sun / DEC, DU / Solaris. I
> am currently researching the same question, with IBM and HP thrown in
> for good measure, and wonder if you received any replies which you
> would be prepared to share with me. I have had a look at the list
> archive but did not see anything obvious, so I wondered if anyone had
> sent any replies directly to you.
Given that I wrote this question some time ago, things have undoubtably
changed. Digital Unix 4.0 is out now, solaris 2.5.1 is out (solaris 2.5
before) Anyway, we used several criteria to help make a decision between
the two platforms. In no special order they included:
1. cost
2. software application support (commercial software, portability)
3. ease of installation and management
4. stability and reliability of overall system
5. performance
The answers we received from various users of both platforms were usually
not founded in realistic experience but rather unfounded opinion. Given
the above criteria, we concluded several things about both systems:
1. cost/performance
- dec alpha's have much better cost per performance than does the sun
ultra sparc however from various vendors and contacts with sun, we
found that sun was willing to compete with dec in price
2. software support
- the dec alpha's have a wide industry support base probably smaller
than sun though, but porting code to the dec, the fact that the dec
included their own compiler, and very good support for both svr4 and
bsd variants (svr4 is optional in kernel and dec's microkernel is based
largely on bsd) make general software support excellent on the decs
(much easier to port to than sun)
- the only thing that may be an issue is the size of pointers and long
integers (among other datatypes) which are twice as large as sun
which are 32-bit long. Also the different host byte-ordering may
impact your application(s)
3. ease of installation and management/stability
- our decs installed very easily and quickly and documentation was
thorough and included (as opposed to sun's answerbook which is not)
- no patches were applied to any dec boxes where our sun had a cd-rom
full plus several more megs from the Internet
- our sun periodically crashes under much lighter load than the decs
which each have been up for months and come down for user-initiated
reasons
Also of note, digital unix is much more expensive for unlimited user
license than comparable solaris workgroup edition software. However,
i've heard of people recompiling /bin/login to circumvent this "problem"
(although we don't do this).
In conclusion we opted to go with the dec boxes and have not been unhappy
about our decision. You mentioned IBM and HP among your choices. We
have recently expanded to x86 based architecture which has great
performance/price. Although our x86 machines are in use for an entirely
different purpose.
Another note to consider is the cost of upgrading and expanding your
system. Compare cost and performance of sbus to pci expansion... Its
also been suggested that dec alphas because of their 64-bit architecture
require twice as much memory as the 32-bit sun conterparts. This latter
issue is not something we've run up against ourselves.
Hope this helps!
- BRad
Received on Wed Aug 07 1996 - 17:07:56 NZST