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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!spool.mu.edu!uwm.edu!cs.utexas.edu!math.ohio-state.edu!jussieu.fr!univ-angers.fr!univ-rennes1.fr!irisa.fr!news-rocq.inria.fr!news2.EUnet.fr!newsbr.eunet.fr!usenet From: Frederic.Marand@osinet.fr (Frederic MARAND) Newsgroups: comp.unix.sco.misc,comp.unix.misc,comp.unix.questions,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc Subject: Re: which Unix to choose? Date: Wed, 06 Nov 1996 07:22:02 GMT Organization: Groupe SEDI / Agorus SA / OSI SARL Lines: 47 Message-ID: <55phr2$5ln@newsbr.eunet.fr> References: <327F5727.179F@citynet.net> <327FC59A.6E48@gcsnet.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 193.107.196.155 X-Newsreader: Forte Free Agent 1.0.82 Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.sco.misc:28592 comp.unix.misc:26090 comp.unix.questions:90583 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:30694 comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc:4820 "Ismaeel Abdur-Rasheed, et. al." <ismaeel@gcsnet.com> wrote: >I've been very happy with Solaris, now at release 2.5.1. I've had .... >Since then I have used exclusively SUN software (and hardware for that >matter for sparc machines). I also insist on maintaining Silver tier >maintenance on software, so I get automatic patches and upgrade >releases. The main trouble with Solaris is that it is mostly unstable and delivered unfinished, with tons of patches you have to install to even get basic functionality to work. At least this was until 2.3. Maybe they finally fixed things in 2.4 and 2.5. Other commercial systems won't require you to maintain constructor maintenance to run smoothly. For instance, we support 237 RS/6000 since 1992 on about 100 sites, all used round the clock as production servers for business computing, comms routing and file/print service, and I computed yesterday from our hotline log that we had spent only around 9 work days fixing something on these systems in the more than four years they have been running. This translates to 9*8 = 72 hours unavailabality of partial unavailability for 4 years * 365 days * 24 hours * 237 hosts = 4429056 hours of works, giving an availability rate about 99.9984 %. Of course, that's not yet the six-sigma quality expected in other domains, and you supposedly can get better figures yet from Tandem, but for ordinary hosts wih only one person administering the whole remotely, I find this really good. Especially when I compare with the time we spend supporting only 6 Suns, which is around 2 work days per month, translating to approximately 99.7 % availability. ... >The determining factor is, what aspect of Unix is critical to your use? .... Indeed ! For laboratory or home development you'll want a freeware Unix. For fashion buys and serious 3D, you'll want an SGI. For large business, an HP or IBM/Bull, for raw speed a DEC Alpha and for all other cases a Sun or PC Unix like SCO or UnixWare.. >organization behind me. So what is the value of that sense of security? for people considering the use of freeware like *BSD where you cross-posted your question, security in the sense of customer support is usually not a consideration. ------------------------- Frederic G. MARAND Agorus SA / OSI SARL Frederic.Marand@osinet.fr -------------------------