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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!munnari.OZ.AU!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!swrinde!newsfeed.internetmci.com!netnews.nwnet.net!nwnet.net!not-for-mail From: aad@nwnet.net (Anthony D'Atri) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.unix.solaris,comp.unix.aix Subject: Re: ISP hardware/software choices (performance comparison) Date: 8 Jan 1996 09:51:27 -0800 Organization: NorthWestNet, Bellevue, WA Lines: 25 Distribution: inet Message-ID: <4crliv$smk@olympus.nwnet.net> References: <4cmopu$d35@vixen.cso.uiuc.edu> <cnordin.821050414@news.vni.net> Reply-To: aad@nwnet.net NNTP-Posting-Host: olympus.nwnet.net Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc:1750 comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc:1878 comp.unix.solaris:55934 comp.unix.aix:67627 >BSDI is going to run around SunOS, Solaris, and AIX . It is faaaaast. >The Sparc20s are very nice and some of them might actually be an >improvement -- but why move yourself off of the commodity prices of >Intel sub-systems ? Because commodity-priced Intel-architecture stuff doesn't run reliably or cheaply. In order to configure such a box to run a Unix decently, you don't use a flinky $25 mass-market enclosure -- you pay more for one with a decent power supply and cooling. You pay more if you want a halfway-usable keyboard, for any machines that need one. In the end, though, memory and disk costs for this sort of application are going to dwarf the CPU costs anyway, which kinda makes the argument moot. >If this is the company money, think about what you can do to >give them (and yourself) the least headache -- since your time >is far more expensive than the equipment or software. IMHO, the Unix-on-MSDOS-hardware route can be by far the most time-consuming and headache-prone. Hardware and software vendor support can be even worse than that of Unix-hardware vendors. It can take a week to get a machine to simply recognize two SCSI controllers. Nobody expects you to put two into a machine, so nobody tells you the convolutions needed to do so. Essential utilities like a disk analysis tool can be missing, and lots of tools may not build at all on the platform -- eg., lsof.