🚀 go-pugleaf

In <4ke00h$7es@dfw-ixnews4.ix.netcom.com> William Taylor <wwtaylor@ix.netcom.com> writes:

>My experience has been that Sun's are generally slow. RS/6000's are very
>fast. We had 66Mhz 601 250's with no L2 cache that outperformed P5/100's
>(prior to EDO RAM and SB Cache). The 80Mhz 601 and 604 boxes generally
>outperform our p5/120 Gateway's. There is no contest with the Power2
>machines.

I couldn't find any single bit of hard data supporting your assertions.
I can equally claim that a decent P90 box running Linux leaves an 
RS/6000-250 in the dust in terms of interactive response time (the
difference is considerably more impressive than the small advantage
suggested by the SPEC numbers, which are still favouring the P90).
Based on my own experience with these systems.  And backed by just as
much hard data as your claim :-)

>Also, I simply _like_ the RS/6000's. For our mission critical uses, PC's
>just were not stable enough and lacked the vendor support of the high-end
>boxes. When the 6000's rarely broke down, they were fixed within less
>than 24hrs. In a 24x7 shop that was VERY important.

If you're willing to pay the same amount of $$$ you're actually paying to
IBM for this kind of hardware support, I'm willing to bet you can find
a shop offering similar support for PC hardware.  The point is that you
can actually save a lot of $$$ taking a different approach with the PC:
with minimal technical skills, get a full set of spare components and
fix it yourself, way before you will even get a call back from the
service shop.  Without minimal technical skills, buy a spare machine,
similarly configured to the production one.  In case of problems, swap
the machines and send the broken one to be fixed.  This is still
considerably cheaper (for PC hardware) than a hardware maintenance
contract (for an RS/6000).

Dan
--
Dan Pop
CERN, CN Division
Email: danpop@mail.cern.ch 
Mail:  CERN - PPE, Bat. 31 R-004, CH-1211 Geneve 23, Switzerland