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

To: cheryl williamson who wrote (9459)	5/1/1998 6:34:00 PM
From: Michael Watkins	Respond to of 64865

Cheryl, I've seen that article referenced here a few times. It is an interesting mix of thoughts, some good points, and flawed jumbled logic as well. I don't come to any stunning conclusions after reading it except that I wouldn't publish it in a magazine, in the state it was left. My motto: Right platform for the job at hand or whatever the application you need demands. Almost rhymes.

To: cheryl williamson who wrote (9459)	5/1/1998 7:00:00 PM
From: Michael Watkins	Respond to of 64865

Cheryl, just thought I'd also let you know that I just, seconds ago, approved a purchase order for a sun box and related disk totalling 56,000. See, I _can_ go both ways. Although, even this example could have had a different outcome with very little effort. The application only needs the Sun box to run an ORACLE instance. My choices were: - put ORACLE on Sun, thus keeping it consistant with the rest of the ORACLE implementations in the data centre - put ORACLE on NT, thus cutting the hardware cost in half, but introducing another variable - configure the app to use MS SQL Server on NT, which has the potential for dropping the database cost to 1/10th of the above, and the hardware in half. I chose the first one for the following reasons: a) staff already had experience with ORACLE / Sun combo b) site already fully licensed for ORACLE, so I didn't have to absorb any DB cost. If I had to, the outcome would have definitely been different c) most expedient thing to do In this example MS SQL Server would have been a more than adequate DB platform; and NT more than adequate to meet the needs. Oddly enough, an NT server is still required to run some processes that only run on an NT box, so I haven't economized on hardware at all. Interestingly enough performance and reliabilty of either platform were not key deciding factors. One is overkill for the application; the other one is simply good enough.