*BSD News Article 82399


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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
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"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
-------------------------