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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: William T. Katz who wrote (7436)	1/29/1998 5:13:00 PM
From: batskinner	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

Which of those things will an NT box not do? Your never-crash-in-2-years scenario seems of little use to many engineers, particularly those in areas with poor electrical infrastructure. I think the point that was being made is that Solaris boxes basically do not crash. I am also an engineer and have used Sun workstations of various sizes and shapes for almost 10 years now. In that time I have seen one system crash (an old 3/60) and one have to be rebooted due to a program that went nuts and spawned off thousands of processes. (I'm not talking about scheduled and intentional reboots here. More below.) I have used NT for about 2 years and have had it crash several times (probably about 8 times total) during that period. And by crash I do mean the blue screen of death, not a single process crashing. The interesting thing is that I use the NT-PCs for wordprocessing essentially and some occasional light computation. On the other hand, I regularly run computational and resource intensive software on the Suns I use (Sparc 10, 20, Ultra). And I'm not referring to simulations that will run in under a minute on a PC. I'm referring to computational solid mechanics problems that run for days/weeks on an Ultra. I also run 3D visualization codes that eat memory for lunch and really push the systems to the limit in terms of resource hogging. Under these conditions, I have never seen a Solaris box crash. As for the "two years without a crash" thing, the point isn't that anyone runs a system for 2 years without rebooting (even Unix needs to be rebooted occasionally to cleanup zombie processes, etc.). The point is that the system doesn't crash at random or simply because it's being heavily loaded. I've done Unix network sys-admin for more than 5 years so I'm not just some engineer who uses the boxes for compiling and never sees the "other" things that will force reboots. Yes, there are rare times when the easiest way to fix a problem is to reboot. But the point is, you can choose when to schedule this sort of thing. It's not the same as my NT box crashing right before my eyes. I think engineers will continue to be split on NT vs Unix for a while, but NT will continue to gain mind share and market share. Yes, NT is taking hold for some engineering applications that a few years ago would have required a workstation but which will now run on PCs. But Sun has recognized that and introduced the Darwin line for the types of applications that require lower end machines. And I too think that NT will gain some ground in engineering but IMHO, it's not there yet. I'm not in love with Sun. If NT would let me do my work better/quicker, I'd have switched to it already. As a final note, let me just say that I realize that the entire world does not view the great workstation debate the way engineers do. Not everyone needs to do simulations that take hours/days/weeks. I sure don't when I'm at home. But the debate here seemed to be focused on engineering applications so I thought I'd throw in my two cents. Clearly though, there's more to the whole picture than just engineering workstations. --Batskinner

To: William T. Katz who wrote (7436)	1/29/1998 8:53:00 PM
From: cheryl williamson	Respond to of 64865

Bill, SUNW's new Darwin systems are the closest thing they have to PC's in price. They are faster in cpu processing speed than the Pentium 266mhz by 30% and faster in the I/O slots by a factor of 2. The Ultra 5 is selling for $2995.00, which is competitive with the Pentium 300mhz motherboard in price/ performance. If PC resellers decide to have a price war with the new high-end PC's, SUNW will have to remain competitive price-wise to compete. I believe that they will. I'm not an expert in floating point, but I have been told that SUNW's graphics are superior and meet the requirements of the most demanding engineering applications. It didn't used to be this way, but now, you pretty much get what you pay for in hardware costs. As the industry consolidates, you'll see fewer and fewer manufacturers with very similar costs. SUNW's hardware is generally of higher quality and superior performance than PC's and it costs more. But, many end-users don't need that much horsepower for what they do, so PC's are ok, because they are a cheap alternative. Now that Intel is making higher spec microprocessors, it is forcing SUNW to come up with more cost- effective solutions to maintain their user base. It's a healthy trend for the industry as a whole. The real difference is not the hardware, but the software. Solaris is light-years ahead of NT as an operating system. That has been proven time and time again. That doesn't mean that NT won't work at all for anybody at anytime. It means that Solaris is just better at doing the things operating systems have to do. That is why SUNW is on so many high-end web-servers and is considered a real player in the enterprise market. MSFT is not yet at the point where its software engineering can be taken seriously. They still have a long way to go. We will see what they come up with in the next 3-4 years, but by that time, SUNW will be entrenched in the enterprise pretty well. cheers, cherylw