Unixware OR Open server 5???

Vendor A provides special software disks for their nonstandard hardware;
vendor B provides hardware that doesn't need special software. Which is
better?

(I have no idea what Acer is offering into the OpenServer market these
days, but I'm well acquainted with the woes associated with vendor
driver disks...)

<snip: OSR5 vs OSR6 vs UW7>

I don't know which one Bob would recommend but I've had success with HP
Proliant ML 350s. Not having tried Acer I'd check three things:

1) HTTP://# - is the Acer listed?

2) HP provide "Enhanced Feature Supplements" (EFS) for Openserver - does
Acer?

3) Do Acer offer the sort of hardware support contracts you need?

...

[Please don't top post]

It would be very, very helpful if, as Bill has suggested, you let us know
what
sort of system you're using now: the type of CPU, the speed, the number of
CPUs, how much memory, how much disk space, what type of disk subsystem
(SCSI? RAID?) and most important, what kind of application you're running
with those 100 users and how they're all connected to the OSR 5.0.6 system
(networked PC's? dumb serial terminals?).

In order to determine where to go, it really helps to know where you are
and what you hope to accomplish. Or, you can just throw money at the
problem and hope it just solves itself.

Just out of curiosity, are you the system administrator for your company,
and are you at all familiar with administering your OSR 5.0.6 system? Or
is your software vendor responsible for setup & maintenance?

Bob

In article <dVRxf.22831$W>,

Well you left out some important information here.

And that is the application you are using. Those can affect
performance greatly.

When I made the earlier reply I didn't indicate the size of the
moved system. It was about 120 users with about 70 printers
configured in with at least two printers in of 22 remote locations.

That system went from regular P III's to Xeons and the built in
cache on the Xeons and the additional CPU performance took the end
of the week run down from 2.5 hours to about 10 minutes.

Whether hyper-threading will help or not will depend on the
application to a great extent.

However before you move to whatever platform it is, do yourself
a favor and run disk i/o benchmarks and timings of things you run
all the time and save those.

If the performance then doesn't measure up to what the sales-droids
tell you you have some ammunition.

In the system I noted one of the support people recommended
something that I considered wrong. He made some comment about how
he knew Unix as he'd seen the source code. I questioned him on that
and it turns out the sources he'd seen were Linux.

The owners of the above new SCO and trusted it - and the vendor
advised all users with more than 16 users that needed to go to IBM
machines and run AIX. When the SCO people checked with others at
a users convention, it turns out they were the largest user in the
country - be it AIX or SCO. With that they learned to check with
outside sources whenever the SW vendor suggested something that
cost money.

In many instances SW/computer vendors have a poorer reputation than
lawyers or used-car salesmen.

Ask your SW vendor to give you names of others using the systems so
you can ask them.

I don't want to come across too negative but I've seen too many
people recommneding things not because the customer needed them but
because they could make more money selling hardware too.

Color me very cynical.

Bill

--
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com

In article <fVNxf.20754$W>,

I can't vouch for the 2 processors - but a couple of years ago when
a client was always hitting the 2GB file size limit we moved
to Unixware 7 and the performance was much better thatn the OSR5.

So it's better head-to-head even on single CPU systems.

Bill

--
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com

Thanks for replying. Our software provider who wants to sell us the new
server, recommend a 2 processor Server because we are expieriencing problem
with the performance of our current server which is in a 100 or so user
environment. He tells us that a 2 processor server with Unixware 7, SMP and
Hypertreading would make that server very performant. But, another server
reseller told me that there is not much difference between OPSR5 and
Unixware 7 when it comes time to work with a 2 processor beast. Do you think
that's right? I mean do we really have to upgrade to version 7?

By the way, our software provider wants to sell us an Acer Altos G710 3.6
Xeon server. I got another quote from some else for an HP Proliant ML 350
3.4 Xeon which is cheaper than Acer's. Which one woud you recommend?

Thanks again.

Steve

"Bob Bailin" <> a ??crit dans le message de
...
...

Wow, this sounds like the setup for a marketing pitch for OpenServer 6.0!

"All the benefits of Unixware 7 in a familiar, easy-to-use OpenServer 5
user interface." You sound like the perfect upgrade candidate.

Seriously, you might want to obtain an OSR6 media kit and explore its possibilities.
Just don't deploy it until Maintenance Pack 2 is released "real soon now."

Yes, it will probably perform better than OSR5, because more kernel and
driver routines are written to be multi-threaded, but do you really need this
incremental performance boost? Do you currently have SMP and a 2-CPU
system? Why do you need to upgrade?

Bob