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From: richard@pegasus.com (Richard Foulk)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.i386
Subject: Re: hardware costs, again...
Message-ID: <1990Jun8.083211.22300@pegasus.com>
Date: 8 Jun 90 08:32:11 GMT
References: <136279@su <1990May29.031904.23465@rfengr.com> <25859@bcsaic.UUCP>
Reply-To: richard@pegasus.com (Richard Foulk)
Organization: Pegasus,  Honolulu
Lines: 28
X-Local-Date: 8 Jun 90 01:32:11 PDT

>]$1,000 in the case of SCO Open Desktop.  Admittedly, it's a
>]2-user license, but you can't convince me you're going to
>]be running the SLC as a server...
>
>Why not?  It would blow the doors off any 386-based server.  Sun sells
>the SparcStation 1 in a server configuration with disk, but no monitor
>or keyboard.  Since the SLC is basically the same CPU, it should make
>a decent server for a small network.

An SLC would probably make an okay server if you didn't need any ports
or anything.  Remember it doesn't have any slots.  Even the slower Sun
3/60 workstation makes a decent server for a small network.
Disregarding Novell style bogosities, it doesn't take much horsepower
to make a decent Unix network server.  Sun usually recommends that
you make sure your "compute servers" and workstations be up to speed
before worrying about server horsepower.

And I'm not sure the SLC would "blow the doors off any 386..."
Where'd you get your data?  My 33MHz 386 is noticeably faster than a
SparcStation 1 on integer only tasks -- I don't think the networking
code does much floating point...

Granted Sun has had quite a head start at optimizing their networking
code, but I think we'll need some real live tests to answer this one.


-- 
Richard Foulk		richard@pegasus.com