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Unix Operating Systems Software

FCW compares Unix workstations 51

Posted by Hemos from the what's-best-for-the-buck dept.
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. "
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FCW compares Unix workstations More

FCW compares Unix workstations

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  • Right, they left out SGI, which happens to be a significant player in the gov field. Why is it that SGI is bypassed when people talk commercial Unix? This still mystifies me.

    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.
  • This is a comparison of unix workstations. A PC running Linux is not the same as an SGI running IRIX. Even an SGI running Linux isn't the same as an SGI running IRIX because if you can't run ProEngineer on it, what's the point?

    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)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Wouldn't it be nifty if all the commercial unix companies got together with all the Linux companies and put together a plan for making Linuxconf into a more generic "Unixconf" tool.

    One administration interface for every Unix. A dream likely never to happen...
  • You haven't used the OS in two years, yet you claim that it's "lame"? AIX certainly has it's quirks, but which OS doesn't? And while I agree that CDE leaves something to be desired, it certainly isn't any fault of AIX, as CDE s*cks on all platforms.

    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.

  • This test is perfectly fair. The point was not to compare Unix versions, but exactly what you said, which 15,000 box was best. Doesn't matter if it is a Power3 running AIX or a SPARC running Solaris, if it is easier to administer it is easier to administer, if it runs the benchmark application faster, then it is faster. No matter what the Workstation, the common ground is that they compete in the under 15K field, and their worth in that catagory can be measuered.
  • We had to upgrade an (forgot HP model name) from 10.10 to 10.20. We used the "Easy, Really", "Painless", Ignite/UX tool to perform the upgrade. The upgrade failed, and totally hosed all the filesystems. Then we discovered that nobody had ever done a backup on the system because "it wasn't in production yet."

    That's my most painful HP/UX memory, although I can't say that my experiences have been as bad as yours!
  • So the IBM workstation broke the price cap, didn't meet the minimum requirements for disk space, and needed two CPUs to match the performance of the Sun with only a single CPU, yet it wins the comparison?
  • I'm not sure about PA-Risc, but, i am sure that Microsoft has allready dropped NT/PPC, and i think they also dropped NT/MIPS. Last time i checked, you had a choice of NT/x86, NT/Alpha, or the upcoming NT/Merced. btw, where did compaq come in? i don't have PDF on this PC...
  • SMIT beats the living hell out of Solaris' admintool and Irix's toolchest, to speak nothing of anything Linux has to offer in the way of administration tools. AIX is quite possibly the easiest Unix I've ever administered, and a pleasure to use. Plus it pays well. What more could you ask for in a commercial unix?

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad

  • Yes, you have a good point. I was looking at it more from a benchmark standpoint. So, like you said, any comparison would be useless. For $15,000 they have picked the best system for the money.
  • It's not that AIX is unstable, or performs badly,
    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.
  • It seems like the Performance catagory emphasized graphics performance over computational performance. Why does the XP1000 get such a low score? It's SpecFP rating is nearly double that of the other processors (note that the IBM is a dual processor box).

    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.
  • 100% right. There's a reason they only compared top-shelf commercial Unix machines -- this is where all the truly high-end engineering CAD work will continue to be done for the forseeable future. I shudder to think of the day when our shop moves to Catia on NT, though it looks like it won't be for a long, long time.

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad

  • *Nobody* bought NEC's MIPS-based NT boxes a few years back. NT will not run on SGI MIPS machines, if that's what anyone was wondering.

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad

  • You haven't used the OS in two years, yet you claim that it's "lame"?

    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.

  • Why?

    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.

  • I love that excuse. What, did they run out of paper and ink? Warehouse space? Or space in the writers/editors mind?
  • The RS6000 may have won, but AIX makes HP/UX look good! And their GUI, unless it has improved dramatically since I used it 2 years ago, leaves much to be desired.
  • Buy Another Drive People!

    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?

  • SunPCi is a good thing? (IMHO loss of sbus in lower end Suns is a BAD thing)

    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...

  • This seems to be a really short list of workstations, not only did they leave out the Free Unix crowd, they also left out the SGI workstations. They also forgot to measure the useablility of these workstations (speed isn't everything in the workstation market) since some of them come with horrible versions of Unix with terrible UIs.
  • This test seems odd to me. Comparing different hardware and OSes at the same time does not seem to be a fair test. All this test goes to show is which $15,000 total package is the best. All versions of Unix are not created equal.

    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)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Probably time limitations. Or lack of cooperation.

    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.
  • While it obviously becomes a bit meaningless on the Web, the space that we ran out of was indeed paper and ink.

    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.
  • the Compaq was only $12,514 Ok, this is odd. Compaq's web site gives the price of a default configured XP1000 with the low end gloria video card as ~$8,000. This story lists it as 12 Grand. For that price you ought to be able to get a stripped down DS-20 not a stripped XP1000. Either someone didn't do their shopping, or Compaq's site info is bad. Or I could just be stoned.
    --Shoeboy
  • For a comparison on Unix workstations, they sure managed to keep bringing up how some of these systems can run NT. What is more useless than NT on Alpha anyway?
  • What is more useless than NT on Alpha anyway?
    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)

    by nosilA ( 8112 )
    Reviews are written by a person.
    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)
  • Linuxconf isn't bad for a GUI tool, but what I really liked about SMIT is the fact that it merely constructed and executed shell scripts, which were logged so you could view them again and integrate them into your own.

    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?)
  • Come on, not even Microsoft applications fail to improve over two years.

    AIX's WebSM is the reason D.H. Brown rated AIX the best commercial Unix.

    Much has changed.
  • Sorry this sentence is confusing. Somewhere between me and the final copy, it changed a bit and became less clear.

    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.
  • I disagree. They were testing complete solutions and comparing them, not specific components or Operating Systems or platforms. They were saying I have $15000 and what is the best system I can get?

    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 kind of comparison is this if it leaves out *BSD, Linux and WinNT? Those are the three most popular operating systems! Plus, *BSD and Linux are free, which should allow a MUCH cheaper system...

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