RE: SCC buys Gauntlet

[Roger Marquis <marquis () roble com>]

"Woeltje, Donald" <dwoeltje () sebh org> wrote:
> If I were you, I'd quit complaining and just use what you feel best suits
> your organization, as there is obviously no convincing you that you might be
> wrong. Regardless, as for the rest of this, I could provide you with an
> equally equipped, equally powerful, equally stable CISC-based computer (a
> "PC") at one fourth to one fifth the cost of a similarly equipped Sun
> computer (I know this because I've done it time and time again; I build them
> myself out of only the highest quality parts on the market; I have just such
> a system at home (along with my other five computers) that has been running
> non-stop (except for hardware additions or OS upgrades) without a failure
> for the past 10 years).

Not sure what provoked this rant but I can tell you why many of my
clients pay more for Sun than the free unixs (based on closed x86
chips).

#1 reason is source code control.  Linux admins are forced to spend
a fair amount debugging even the simplest things, like ping, that
don't work like they should.  I spent 30 minutes alone tracking
down and fixing all the broken links under /usr/lib in the last
RH7.2 install.  Slashdot had a post just today from one poor admin
who was downgrading to 2.2 and getting rid of RiserFS to avoid
losing any more data.

#2 is upgrades.  How long does RH support a release, a kernel, or
an app?  6 months?  A year?  I've seen Sun apps in daily use that
were compiled over 12 years ago, and are still supported.  A Solaris
installation can rely on well debugged patch clusters for 3 or 4
years.  By contrast I know FreeBSD admins who spent thousands of
their employers payroll dollars on upgrades because FreeBSD only
supports last 6 months' OS revisions (if that).  You might not hear
about the production servers hosed by cvsup introducing bugs but
there are a lot of them out there.  This all may be acceptable if
you're only hosting a few webservers or dialins and don't mind
hacking but it often skews the long term costs of maintaining a
Unix server away from the "free" *nix.

#3 serial consoles, don't run a datacenter without them.  Can't do
that with a PC BIOS.

...

> I've got one at my desk (the very computer that I'm
> using right now) that would kick my Ultra 10's butt and has all the features
> that you've listed (features that my Ultra 10 doesn't even have in it);
> UltraSCSI RAID (Level 5), triple power supplies, serial management
> interface, dual 1GHz processors, 4 GB's of RAM, over 300 GB's of disk space,
> Fibre Channel RAID (Level 5), hot swappable drives for both the Fibre
> Channel RAID subsystem and the UltraSCSI RAID subsystem, a high-end video
> card, MPEG-2 decoder card, sound card, fiber gigethernet NIC, multi-port
> modem card (six 56K ports), a 21" Mitsubishi DiamondScan monitor, and a BEST
> Fortress 1425 UPS.

Sounds like a fine machine, until it has to be upgraded.  It's also
the sort most experienced Unix admins would have to spend 40 to 80
hours putting together.  A similar Sun can be built in less than
half a day (at a higher initial cost but maintained with a fraction
of the ongoing labor).

The bottom line is than many linux-heads are in denial about the
capabilities of their code base and cannot be relied on for objective
information.  Sure there's a market for high-maintenance free
solutions, there's also a market for larger commercial solutions.

-- 
Roger Marquis
Roble Systems Consulting
http://www.roble.com/

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