crosson@cam.nist.gov (Bob Crosson) (07/08/89)
We have a VAX 11/785 which is running VMS 4.7 right now. It talks to some Symbolics workstations over an Ethernet via the DEC Ethernet controller and DECnet. It also has an Excelan Ethernet controller attached to the same Ethernet, through which it talks TCP/IP to some (~30) Suns and a gateway to the Internet. The applications on the system are mostly databases and development and testing of scientific libraries for data analysis (lots of Fortran compilation). Our environment seems to be going toward Unix derived operating systems. The replacement for our Cyber 205 will probably be required to have some form of Unix on it. We want to be able to run NFS, X Windows, etc., on the VAX in the near future, besides what we use it for now. We're thinking of moving from VMS to Ultrix. Has anyone out there done this recently? What are the pitfalls? What can you do under VMS that you can't under Ultrix, and vice versa? Will it adversely affect what we use the VAX for now? Etc., etc... Any info would be greatly appreciated. Please mail any responses because I don't read this group regularly. Send responses to crosson@cam.nist.gov Thanks again. Bob Crosson Nat. Inst. of Standards and Technology (formerly Nat. Bureau of Standards)
khb@gammara.Sun.COM (gammara) (07/08/89)
In article <642@fs2.cam.nist.gov> crosson@cam.nist.gov (Bob Crosson) writes: > >We're thinking of moving from VMS to Ultrix. Has anyone out there While I work for a unix house, and do encourage its use .... Moving from VMS to Ultrix tends to result in: 1) Lower machine performance (more users can share a vax running vms than ultrix ... in my experience) 2) VMS debugger and fortran environment is better (tracebacks automatically, etc). 3) More robust On the plus side for ultrix ... is it looks more like unix ... and is better suited for use in a mixed vendor environment. You may wish to consider sysV or bsd for your vax ... I have used all three and both the sysV and bsd stuff was closer to the other vendors stuff (not suns, btw). Plus for ultrix is that now that DEC has signed up to do RISC (via MIPS) Ultrix probably has better support than the third party offerings. As for the 205 replacement ... if you can wait until 2nd QTR next year PRISMA claims that their 100Mflop SPARC machine (sunos, sun4 binary compatible) mainframe should be out before then (public date is first hw jan 1990 ... my guess is that one has to wait a few months from first hw to first shipment :>). Won't have all those nifty vector instructions, but 100mflops scalar is respectible (and price will probably be about $1million). Of course, all the opinons are mine and are not endorsed by anyone. cheers -- Keith H. Bierman |*My thoughts are my own. Only my work belongs to Sun* It's Not My Fault | Marketing Technical Specialist ! kbierman@sun.com I Voted for Bill & | Languages and Performance Tools. Opus (* strange as it may seem, I do more engineering now *) Keith H. Bierman |*My thoughts are my own. Only my work belongs to Sun* It's Not My Fault | Marketing Technical Specialist ! kbierman@sun.com I Voted for Bill & | Languages and Performance Tools. Opus (* strange as it may seem, I do more engineering now *)