OT: Solaris/Sun fans, advice pleeze...

[Soren Aalto <soren@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Or even HPUX or AIX fans...I'm spent some of the morning
looking through tenders for new hardware to "rightsize"
the current S/390 system here at the university.  The
proposals are for two new machines, one production and
one development/DRP machine.

On the Sun front, the proposals are for:

420R with 2x440Mhz CPUs, 1GB memory, 18GB OS disk + 72GB RAID array
220R with 1x440Mhz CPU, 1GB memory, 2x18GB drives

or

450E with 2x400Mhz CPUs...and as above
250E with 1x400Mhz CPU, as above.

There was an AIX proposal, but I can't remember model
numbers -- very similar config.  And there were a couple
of HP9000 proposals, for L2000/L1000 chassis, with similar
specs.  However, the HP stuff was broken up into "solution
bundles" that made the pricing almost impossible to 
figure out.

I dunno how to size these boxes -- the intended application
is to run Natural/Adabas for as many as 100 concurrent
users.  My *guess* would be that these boxes would
be adequate, but I dunno what a 440Mhz UltraSparc CPU
compares to in my world.  The pricing horrifies me,
however -- when people start talking about R6000 for
a PCI ethernet controller, etc.

Does anybody have any comments about Solaris vs HPUX 11?
My gut predjudice is: there are probably more Solaris
hackers out there than HPUX guys, and certainly this
is true when it comes to Internet-related stuff.  I am
looking at the "rightsizing" as a major opportunity to
start nudging our MIS people in the direction of things
like web-based applications and such.  I see that HPUX
"comes with Netscape FastTrack server," which is no
advertisement.  However I also thought I heard that 
HP was shipping Apache on their boxes now.  What does
Solaris ship with as an httpd?  I understand that Solaris
now ships with a supplementary CD with a lot of GNU 
development stuff on it.  My impression is that the
"Internet runs on Sun...and FreeBSD, Linux, and sometimes,
on a good day, on IIS/NT(2k)"

Which companies have the clearest open source strategy
(ok, probably IBM...)?  I note that there are license
fees in the tenders for HPUX, but not for Solaris.  Is
it really free with the hardware, or is it part of the
bundle price?

Pricewise there seems to be a clear winner...however I
also find that I am underwhelmed by the "support" you
get out there.  I have dealt with some vendors, and
frankly some of the field engineers working with Sun
equipment should really go back and play on Windows98.
The HP guys that used to provide support -- well, they
were pretty good, but they weren't a patch on what I
could get your common-or-garden Linux installation to do.

Perhaps that's what I like about open source -- when you
have finally accepted that you aren't going to get
support by paying for it, you discover you can get
better support for free from your peers.

-- 
soren k. aalto           | mail : soren@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
house geek               |
networking services      | voice: +27-35-902-6800
university of zululand   | fax:   +27-35-902-6028