JC -
Cheryl is passionate about Unix - and I can understand that, 20 years ago I was an absolute zealot on the subject at a time when Unix was a university curiosity. In the early 90s I did a project to upgrade a large mainframe distribution system and proposed a Unix - Oracle solution. Management, backed by the mainframe IT team, wanted to do it on DB2 over MVS...
Instead of swimming upstream, I got the IT manager, the head of technical services and a bunch of the programmers to start using Unix on a PC at home - "just for mail" - and spent a couple of days teaching them the basics. I also put up a bit of their system on a SPARC 1 workstation... they were COBOL mainframers but not dumb - when they saw how easy the system was to administer, and the kind of access they could get remotely, and in short the whole open systems world, they started to pay attention. And when the SPARC 1 delivered better sort performance than a 3090-600J, they started to understand the economics as well. The system was approved on Unix, (eventually ended up on a SUN 690...) and within 3 years, the rest of the mainframe systems were replaced - including the accounting systems... the IT budget was 1/3 of the mainframe run rate, with better performance.
passion counts, and I don't fault Cheryl for her enthusiasm... but facts count too, and I would like to think that we can understand the reasons for SUNW's success without resorting to half-truths and propaganda. |
