ronb@uunet.uu.net (Ron Baxter) (02/09/89)
Thanks for all the replies, I have edited what follows quite a bit, but think the important comments remain. __________ jas@proteon.com (John A. Shriver): The Solbourne is ultimately nothing more than a parallel processor version of the Sun-4/260. I can't see that parallel processing (asymmetric, I think) is going to help worth a squat on file service, since that's all kernel processing. __________ Chuck Musciano <chuck%trantor.harris-atd.com@munnari.oz>: The Solbourne is priced about 25% lower than the equivalent Sun machine, and is completely binary compatible. It runs a licensed copy of SunOS, right from Sun. Consider this, though: Sun is not stupid. They would not license their product to another company who is undercutting them by 25% unless they were ready to roll out significant price/performance improvements in the near future. Wait for the February product announcements that were hinted at at the Miami SUG. I predict you'll find a better, cheaper machine to meet your needs. __________ daw@Sun.COM (Doug Ward): If you are talking about buying a complete new machine, I as a Sun employee would prefer to see you buy Sun, of course (we're all very loyal here, since we're all stockholders as well;-)), but Solbourne could mostly fill the bill. I believe most applications will work transparently, but the kernel is somewhat different. In particular, since they have multiprocessors, they have already or will in the future be making a number of kernel modifications to synchronize between processors. This will affect among other things, device drivers. So I would not expect third party hardware which comes complete with drivers to necessarily work. At the least I'd question Solbourne closely about that before buying *if* you are apt to be in the market for that sort of thing. __________ siedelbe@stout.UCAR.EDU (Mike Siedelberg): <..introduces himself as a potential customer who has visited Solbourne> Some things I can say: They use their own proprietary bus for their main boards, which is quite high bandwidth. They support normal VME boards on a seven slot bus. The only disk system available from them at this time is SCSI bus stuff. They can run two CPUs, but one is strictly a slave of the first and cannot be scheduled or maninpulated in any way, but this will change in the future. They plan soon to go to the cypress gate arrays (as does sun), which will supposedly give twice the normal sun 4 performance. __________ Anne Skamarock <godzilla!skam@boulder.colorado.edu>: <.. introduces herself as a Solbourne employee> 1. Compatibility Solbourne, though it's often coined "Sun Clone" is NOT a clone, in the sense that Compaq was/is an IBM clone, but is a compatible workstation. The importance of this distinction is that we claim binary compatibility down to the system call interface (as you might expect as we offer a master/slave multiprocessing configuration). So, any program that adheres to that interface will run (we haven't found one that hasn't yet) BUT if your programs bypass the syscall interface and poke directly at the hardware, there will be problems. 2. Third Party Programs We are working very hard with third party vendors to qualify their software on our machine. As a new company, we still have a long way to go to build up a base like that of Sun's but, so far, we've had no trouble with the applications not being able to run... More a matter of being licensed to run on our machine. 3. Peripherals We currently offer SCSI disks and SCSI tape. We have announced support for SMD disks in a deskside pedestal arrangement. We do not currently support any more than 2 serial lines but it's something that I feel we NEED to provide. < .. hype about customer support deleted> __________ Ron Baxter, CSIRO Div Maths & Stats, PO Box 218, Lindfield, NSW, Australia. Phone: +61 2 467 6059 Email: ronb@natmlab.oz.au