sharp@uunet.uu.net (Maurice Sharp) (12/12/89)
I have a decision to make on Sun vs. Apollo. I would like comments from the Sun crew as to why I should buy it. I realize that SPARC stations are cheap, but I could get good performance from a DN10000 and a few DN2500's for less. Is Sun coming out with a 10000 competitor ? What about NFS, I have been told that it is very buggy and very slow. What kind of built in distributed processing paradigm is there ? How close to BSD4.3 (NOT sys5.3 :-() is the OS ? What is administration like ? Here at the U. I have administered Apollos (a dream, they take care of themselves, if only we knew about the damn patches !!). I have used suns (from 3/50's to Sparcstation 1's). I like SunView for the display paradigm (Postscript). I have found NFS to be singularly unreliable and the sys5.3/bsd4.3 mix to be a royal pain. I was also most unhappy with OS 4.0 (as were our sys admins). On the other hand, 10.1 has not been a dream either. I am not posting this to start a Sun vs. Apollo war ! I want truthful, reasonably unbiased views from current users and especially current administrators. Please EMAIL me your replies, I would rather not troll through the newgroup, and this way I can post summaries.