>My own opinion is that SUNW will dominate the server market for those
>companies committed to UNIX, with the exception of the relatively >rare graphics intensive users which will remain within the SGI/CRAY
>realm.
Yeah, right. CRAY C90 users have these machines because they're graphical users?
Sun obviously has a *massive* presence in the HPC world, right? Don't extrapolate from the current enterprise Unix market to the future general Unix market.
>They will deliver performance, not as good as UNIX,
If Intel delivers performance, then some Unix vendors (current ones, or new ones) will use their chip. Period. Nothing to do with Unix vs. NT. You will note that many of the benchmark numbers that Compaq post for their current Intel-based machines (indeed, the very SPECint/fp95 numbers that Intel publishes) use a flavour of Unix (SCO for Compaq; not sure for Intel and the reference compiler).
As for NT, in the enterprise space 'good enough is' does not apply, certainly not wrt scalability and general robustness, and flight envelope of an OS. The adage may apply in the workstation market (after all, if your application runs on it, that's it), but it doesn't cut it in the server market.
>High priced Unix based systems will be reserved for the true
>believers who cannot afford anything less than superior performance.
See above. Performance is only one of the relevant metric, and not the most important one for most of the business apps (it is in things like data warehousing, or large database servers). NT has other weaknesses. |
