From: feigin@iis.ethz.ch (Adam W. Feigin)
Subject: Re: avoiding Solaris
Organization: Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich, CH
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 1992 09:07:18 GMT

I've resisted following up on this thread, but since I go on vacation
in a week......

I heartily agree with Florian that Sun is now just another Unix
workstation vendor. They make a lot of hype about Solaris and SPARC,
but now it seems that they're not giving you anything special that you
cant get from (insert your favorite acronym/corporate name here).

Its amazing how customers will just take whatever their salespeople
tell them, and believe it hook, line, and sinker. For example, at the
announcement 2 weeks ago I watched in astonishment as Scott McNealy
alluded to other companies having many operating systems, different
CPU's performing a "juggling act; hope they dont drop it" Gee Scott,
do you remember the Sun386i, or even the Sun3 line ? Dont suppose that
Sun will be supporting those machines, or their operating systems
until hell freezes over ? Sure, customers can upgrade to Sparc, but
maybe they dont have the $$$$, or maybe they've invested large sums in
software that they dont want to have to pay for AGAIN, or maybe they
have a REAL bad taste left in their mouths when Sun pushed their
upgrade from 3/50s to 3/60s, even though the announcement of the SS1
was just a few weeks off (gotta hand it to them on that one, an easy
way to up the corporate balance sheet). Sure, Sun isn't the only
company that has pulled this trick, but they've certainly done it with
much higher visibility than anyone else.

Then, he had the unmitigated gall to mention Vaporware, and how other
companies were announcing products that they could not yet deliver.
Gee Scott, when do you think you'll be able to deliver machines with
the SuperCache chip, if you dont mind my asking ?

Ah yes, and then we had Ed Zander touting Solaris for his 4 minutes.
Great speil Ed, but you (and your company) are not very good liars.
There he was, claiming yet again that that Solaris has C2 security (he
didn't say C2 security features, he said C2 security). If I was a
litigating type, We'd be seeing a lot of each other in court. Sun has
NEVER received C2 certification from NCSC/NSA. What he said was an
outright lie (at least he was smiling when he said it, like a good
used-car salesman).

I really dont care about the BSD/SVRx arguments. I've administered
both BSD and SV systems, and their administrative models are
different. Sure, if all you've ever dealt with is BSD boxes, you'll
have a rather rude awakening when someone plunks down a SV box on your
network to administer.

I just hope that Sun isn't going to force you to use their GUI sysadm
tools. Thats a frightening thought, as I'm sure people who have used
SMIT on AIX (no flames please, AIX is about the worst operating system
on the planet, and should probably be banished from the face of the
earth) can attest to.  The way it was presented makes me question how
much thought they put into it. If I was a big multinational, I
certainly dont want someone in the Paris office fooling around with
the machines in Tokyo; the impression I got was that this is what it
was designed for.

Lastly, Solaris performance is horrible (okay, I haven't seen 2.1
yet). It runs far slower on an SS2 than 4.1.x runs on a SS1+. I'm sure
the performance will get better, but its starting to look like the 4.0
fiasco all over again.....

							/AWF
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Internet: feigin@iis.ethz.ch				 Adam W. Feigin
UUCP:{backbones}!iis!feigin			     Network Systems Manager
Mail: Integrated Systems Laboratory	      Institute for Integrated Systems
      ETH-Zentrum			  Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
      CH-8092 Zurich				       Zurich, Switzerland
      Switzerland
Phone: +41 1 256 50 53
      
  "In Confession, you blame yourself, in analysis, you blame everyone else"





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