bzs%bostonu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa (Barry Shein) (02/27/86)
As I have mentioned before on this list Computer Science here has sold their VAX/780 running 4.2bsd and replaced it with two SUN/3s. In brief, one SUN/3 might have been enough, splitting to two systems has largely reduced load across the two systems to 1.0 or less all day, this system is quite fast (typically we have 12-16 interactive users all afternoon per SUN.) A CRITICAL FACTOR IS MEMORY, 4MB IS NOT ENOUGH, when we went to 8MB (so far, on one of the systems) it helped dramatically. Memory is pretty cheap anyhow, this is a bad place to skimp. I still intend to write up our experiences, I have about twenty requests to do so from the net and the story is more involved than this paragraph indicates, but the bottom line is I feel like I made a good decision (maybe a great decision.) Now for the flames about delivery etc. I agree, delivery is tough, we have experienced a lot of what people have mentioned. I could chalk it up to life in the fast lane, look, we don't have our 180s yet (this week?) we are temporarily using 160s. Think about it, we replaced our big 780 with a little box that slips under a table in our machine room and it was a significant upgrade in power (as opposed to many other boxes that claim at best to be about the same as a 780.) This is both CPU and I/O as far as I can tell, about 4X CPU and 2X I/O (maybe a little more) across the two systems. Hey guys, this is a brand new product, remember those one year long delivery queues from some of the big vendors, everyone here is grumbling about 90 days or so. I think the biggest mistake SUN is making is not communicating to their sales people what can and cannot be done, I think *this* is the serious problem if any, too many promises (I immediately sensed that some of what our salesman was saying sounded a little unrealistic.) The pressure for these systems from SUN seems to be enormous, maybe bigger than you think. For example, Computervision has re-worked their entire product line around them and is probably eating up hundreds if not more of these per month. Their CAD/CAM systems apparently won't run w/o memory expansions, so memory expansions have gotten a little scarce this month. You can imagine the pressure from an OEM like that, from everything I have heard about CV, their life is on the line in getting these products to their customers (and personally I think CV is about to 'make it'.) Kodak is also apparently OEM'ing the boxes. Universities, from what I hear, are ordering these things by the dozens, hundreds and in one rumored case THOUSANDS, yes THOUSANDS, tho over some time. Like I said, life in the fast lane. We may have bought into a company that is suffering from one of the biggest successes in this industry in history. It's not surprising there are a few growth pains. At least, I'm not surprised (consider that up to before the SUN/3 the total installed base was about 15,000, there are almost surely more SUN/3s on order right this minute.) And as far as I can tell, the delivery delays will be a nuisance, but nothing amazing. Hell, one very big vendor was supposed to deliver my student time-sharing system July 1 so I could set it up for students over the summer. I figured some slippage, of course it showed up the day before classes! There's nothing new under the sun... -Barry Shein, Boston University Apologies in advance if any of my details here are a little inaccurate, consider it proof that I am only a customer of SUN and have no other interest or special inside line to information. If it makes a difference I have in the past worked on projects with Computervision and will probably do so again in the near future, but I doubt that had much to do with this discussion except to provide an example.