FCW compares Unix workstations 51
EngrBohn writes "Federal Computer Weekly evaluated Unix workstations by Compaq, HP, IBM, and Sun -- they specified minimum hardware requirements and a maximum price; beyond that, all was fair. They did not include *BSD, Linux, or WinNT due to space limitations. Here's a chart (in PDF) comparing the workstations. IBM's RS6000 43P Model 260 won on technical merit, but it exceeded the $15K price cap. "
Re:Where are the O2s? (Score:1)
Worse, the evaluation placed high emphasis on admin tools. Around here, with Solaris, Irix, HP-UX, Digital Unix and Linux in one shop, noone is ever going to use SMIT or SAM or whatever. Just too much pain to learn them all.
Unifying sysadmin tasks is best done with scripting, at which Unix excels (as opposed to NT, say).
If your shop has one flavor of Unix only and has few, if any experienced sysadmins, then admin tools are for you. However, I don't think that most shops in the gov domain are small and hence emphasis on administration ease seem misguided.
What equally mystifies me is that the Compaq unit beats the competition 2:1 on CPU benchmarks, but only gets 3 stars on performance. Yes, it was weak in the graphics dept., but how can you loose so badly that you give up a 2:1 advantage? In my workstation I'd rather tolerate weakish graphics than a slow CPU. Of course, we are never told actual performance numbers and how they were weighted. Too bad.
Re:What good is this? (Score:1)
While Linux and *BSD will run some workstation hardware, it is not the native OS on any true UNIX workstation. Besides, just because the operating system is free does not necessarily make the system cheaper. The operating system is a fairly small part of the cost of a workstation, and if it makes the system more reliable, easier to configure, or easier to get vendor support, then it more than makes up for its own price.
Don't get me wrong, I love linux and use it on most of my computers, but the Compaq Alpha with Tru64 UNIX (why'd they have to change the name anyway) on my desk is a much better CAD station than anything running Linux.
-Alison
Re:What does this sentence mean? (Score:1)
One administration interface for every Unix. A dream likely never to happen...
Another well informed opinion (Score:1)
If you want to help others, please speak about what you understand; don't just fly off the handle and shout "AIX sucks" without knowing what you're talking about. It's these uninformed rants and prejudices that are making the Open Source movement look like a bunch of crybabies.
Re:Fair Test?; Perfectly (Score:1)
DOH! I forgot to read the second page. (Score:1)
HPUX >= LAME (Score:2)
That's my most painful HP/UX memory, although I can't say that my experiences have been as bad as yours!
Strange results (Score:1)
Re:What's worse (Score:1)
AIX is fine. (Score:1)
- A.P.
--
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad
Re:Fair Test? (Score:1)
Re: YOU == FUDSLINGER (Score:1)
it's that the ODM and the commands to manipulate
it are a pain in the ass. When I want to do the
same thing on all nodes of an SP, I don't want to
have to use SMIT on every last one of them.
Once you get past that, though, it's just fine.
Emphasized Graphics Performance? (Score:1)
As far as documentation goes, the man pages that come with AIX are terrible while those that come with Digital Unix are excellent.
It seems to be that the IBM and HP should have been hit a little more on their prices. The points lost in the price catagory were more than made up for on the features catagory.
I don't understand the statement about linux in the IBM administration box. What's linux got to do with this machine?
Seems like the reviewer(s) prefer GUI system admin apps over the tried-and-true command line utilities.
Nailed it. (Score:1)
- A.P.
--
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad
They dropped MIPS because... (Score:1)
- A.P.
--
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad
Re:Another well informed opinion (Score:1)
I said "unless it has improved".. It may well have. And it isn't CDE I was complaining about -- it's the management GUI, SMIT. I just found it got in the way of the things I wanted to do.
ME != (FUDSlinger && Intentional) (Score:1)
I agree that AIX is stable, but my main complaint is that it does things in weird/nonstandard ways. I can login to pretty well any Linux, *BSD, Solaris, or Digital Unix box and know that the basic admin commands and how they work, with few exceptions, are more or less the same. AIX and HPUX seem completely different.
Also the fact that you can't, (or at least it wouldn't work for me) do things like add a user by adding them to /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow. You have to use their tool (SMIT).
Oh yeah, and I saw a few weird errors and inconsistencies that had no apparent explaination, and hours talking to IBM's tech support (at least their tech support is good :) to find the solution. Like a machine that "forgot" its partition table. Not fun to restore.
Space limitations? (Score:1)
AIX == LAME (Score:1)
Out Of Space??! (Score:2)
That was the least detailed, least comparitive comparison I have ever seen. Where are the tables on system preformance? Where is the list of features and details about what each system has for that price? Where is the valid reason why some systems didn't win?
Oh, they said IBM, I better go get one... (sarcasm). Not that there is anything wrong with IBM systems, but they didn't even specify which one and which configuration was thier winner, and what makes it better. IBM's RS/6000 43P Model 260 according to what they are saying is just under $15,000 and bearly nudges out the competition. What about this makes it hard for me to believe.
If I send them a 1G drive, will they fill it with a detailed comparison and get it on the web, since "space" was the problem in reporting the comparison?
Read the Side Bars... (Score:2)
Only 4 systems on thier one table, and it's a pdf table... I am a little dissapointed. I suppose buying $15,000 systems isn't the easiest thing to do for a comparison, but I would have thought an SGI would have made the cut of choices. Notice, HP, IBM and Sun only have 9-5 support, wheras Compaq is 24-7, and Compaq had the only money back guarentee if you didn't felt the system lived up to it's claims after it arrived. But that only gave it 20 points more out of the total of 1000 points. "None of the boxes in this comparison uses Linux tools, so the System Management Interface Tool used by the IBM model is the big administration winner." So, why not be fair and add a VAResearch box to the list? I'm sure they could have provided a $15,000 box for testing.
Also, note that the IBM was $17,587 and the Compaq was only $12,514, but that just factored into the score, and they didn't really cap the price at $15,000...
Where are the O2s? (Score:1)
Fair Test? (Score:1)
In the article, they asked for the following systems: "512M of RAM, a 9G hard disk, 24-bit video and a 20-inch monitor. This is the minimum configuration, and vendors were free to add on as they saw fit." How is this a fair test?
What they should have done is restrict the test to specific hardware requirements, not a floating scale of hardware. Throwing in different flavors of Unix just confuses the test more. It's like comparing different brands of apples and oranges all together.
The results of this test will only be useful to managers who have no technical backgrounds.
Re:Space limitations? (Score:1)
I have a friend now working for "the Great Satan of Routers" who did some benchmarking for a very large insurance company where he was working. He wanted to see what he could get for $30,000 in the way of a workstation to do actuarial modelling with marketing matrixes (less exotic than it sounds -- useful data mining, basically). Initially he thought that this was silly (why buy 50 small workstations when you can buy 10 supercomputers), but then he thought that it would keep everyone happy and allow more progress towards that goal as people saw the benefits and wanted queries run more quickly. A big company that used to be the premier scientific computing company (that still makes great, albeit too expensive measurement stuff) wanted to go NT. My friend chuckled and said UNIX only. They do have UNIX, their UNIX salespeople were happy (although their UNIX sucked then and suckes much harder now, despite being "64 bit"). The NT salespeople got together with the NT salespeople and doubleteamed management four levels up. The procurement process was brought to a halt until the NT boxes could be included. My friend had specified performance targets, so it was a moot point. Even dual PPros couldn't get there with NT. The vendor said that they could, once my friend had voiced this leeeeeeeetle problem to management. So management said "Wait for the NT boxes." The NT boxes never arrived. Nine months later, they gave the go-ahead for the UNIX purchases (they went with Alphas, despite DEC UNIX). During the whole nine months, the NT reps and the H -- oops -- the computer company reps were trying to sell management on the idea of 4x PPros under everyone's desk. The only reason that that didn't work was that they were about $65,000 apiece as specced out.
The deal taught me a few things:
1. Microsoft has no problem helping people who are lying and cheating to move NT.
2. This glimpse into the "[computer company] Way" explains why [computer company initials]-UX sucks so hard and why every attempt to get bugs fixed become a circle of recrimination.
3. The people pushing NT know that they are lying, cheating SOBs and they don't care. They will happily try to sell you stuff that they know doesn't work.
So, I would think that the magazine may have had to go ahead without the NT boxes because the vendors refused to provide them because they knew how poorly they would fare.
Re:Space limitations? (Score:2)
Unix is a broad topic. You can't cover it completely in 2500 words. I think that a comparison between Sun/HP/IBM/Compaq/SGI Unix hardware, Intel based Unix, and NT would be a very good, but very different article.
By the way, a Linux comparison (Red Hat/Caldera/SuSE/TurboLinux) runs next week.
Re:Read the Side Bars... (Score:1)
--Shoeboy
Unix Workstation? (Score:2)
What's worse (Score:1)
NT on PA-Risc, NT on PowerPC and NT on MIPS are good contenders. (yes, they do exist) The most useless of all though, has to be NT on x86 - nothing is more useless that this.
--Shoeboy
Truth (Score:1)
People have biases.
Stats lie.
As with any review, you have to read the whole thing, not just the bottom line numbers. It looks like they had it in for the Compaq and fudged the numbers to make sure it came out lowest. If you read all of text in the pdf chart and draw your own conclusions, you will be making a much more informed decision. If you read different reviews, you will make an even better decision.
You can come up with a set of benchmarks to make a Mazda Miata look better than a Ferrari F355. IT Managers are not stupid (most of the time, anyway). They look at more than one review, they look up *all* the info. It makes no sense to get your feathers all ruffled over one obviously incorrect review.
This may be a lot better than the MindCraft benchmark (please don't start a flame war over this), but it's the same kind of useless complaining. What it really comes down to when comparing UNIX workstations/OS's is what do *you* want to use it for.
-Alison (sorta bored at work if you can't tell)
Re:AIX is fine. (Score:1)
It was easier to admin 10 AIX boxes (2 webservers and 2 DB servers (DB2 and custom ISAM)) than 2 Solaris boxes (Verity Topic engine) at the job where I adminned AIX...
AIX was fine in 1995, and has only improved... Anyone who tells you different was either stung when it sucked (pre-1995) or is a poseur parroting complaints from those graybeards who were stung..
Still, they could do with boosting the price/performance a whole lot.. Sun still cleans IBM's clock in that regard, let alone Linux! (then again, how would a U10/366 with full Veritas LVM compare to a 43P260?)
Re:Another well informed opinion (Score:1)
AIX's WebSM is the reason D.H. Brown rated AIX the best commercial Unix.
Much has changed.
Re:What does this sentence mean? (Score:1)
What I meant to say is that Linuxconf represents, to me, a great administrative tool. It is comprehensive, intuitive, and offers a consistent interface for a variety of functions.
It amazes me that vendors who have been building Unix hardware and writing Unix operating systems for years have yet to come up with something that comes close to Linuxconf. The closest thing to that in this comparison is, in my opinion, SMIT.
Sorry that I didn't communicate this clearly in the article.
Re:Fair Test? (Score:1)
The minimum requirements would be standard for anyone buying a system. IE you can get more filesystem/ memory if you give up monitor space ect. By specifying a minimum, you stop them scimping on some components in favor for others.
Of course, all benchmarks, comparisons, ect? are useless!
What good is this? (Score:1)