🚀 go-pugleaf

As requested, I am summarising the responses to my original query.
For those who didn't see my first posting, here are the questions I
posed:

        We are faced with a choice of getting either a Sun 3/260CXP or
        one of HP 320SRX, HP 350SRX and HP 825SRX.  From the
        literature, it seems that the Sun 3/260CXP is comparable with
        the 350 with the 320 being weaker and the 852 being twice as
        strong (though weaker than a Sun 4); is this correct?

        I would appreciate any input from people who have used these
        machines regarding the quality of the HP-UX Unix system, the
        graphics quality and speed and the computational speed
        (particularly floating point), and any general impressions of
        user friendliness, learnability, etc.

I received four responses.  Since these responses were sent to me as
private e-mail, I am not including the names or e-addresses of the
respondants as the opinions they expressed may put them in a
problematic situation at their place of employment.

Response #1:

        I haven't used HP systems much myself, but various people
        around here have.  They have gained a reputation for having
        idiosyncratic software.  They tend to end up as doorstops.

Response #2:

        Article is from "ephraim@techunix.BITNET (Ephraim Silverberg)":
        > We are faced with a choice of getting either a Sun 3/260CXP
        > or one of HP 320SRX, HP 350SRX and HP 825SRX...

        I am also interested in such information and I am sure other
        people on the net will be too. Perhaps you could summarise any
        responses you get in a posting to the net? Thanks.

        One observation I had is that I assume the Sun uses a 4.2 file
        system where as HP-UX probably uses the SYS 5 file system. For
        large files the sys 5 file system can be 10 times slower than
        4.2. (I have heard thi from three quite independent sources).
        For small files its not as bad.  I however am working on a
        database project and we want a workstation to play with nicer
        interfaces to the database so disk throughput is very
        important.

Response #3:

        In article <8802111716.AA29397@techunix.bitnet> you write:
        >We are faced with a choice of getting either a Sun 3/260CXP
        >or one of HP 320SRX, HP 350SRX and HP 825SRX.  From the
        >literature, it seems that the Sun 3/260CXP is comparable with
        >the 350 with the 320 being weaker and the 852 being twice as
        >strong (though weaker than a Sun 4); is this correct?

        I agree with your observations. I can't give you alot of input
        re: graphics comparisions because that's not my forte, nor is
        it what we ~heavily~ do with our Suns and HPs. To me it comes
        down to a question of BSD vs. SYSV.  Do you like (or are you
        used to) the look and feel of a BSD box or the smell (sic) of
        SYSV box ? If networking at all plays a role I give the Sun
        box the nod because of it's "state of the BSD" (4.3)
        networking and it's networking extensibility. We often put new
        hardware or software interfaces or protocol stacks into our
        Suns boxes and kernels. Because of the SYSVisms on the HPs
        this will be much more difficult. Also, HP is still
        ~basically~ running BSD4.1 networking code. HP promised 4.3
        code in January, but it is now March. HP is still in it's beta
        phase for NFS.

        I personally dislike HP hardware packaging. So many "boxes"
        with zillions of cables all over the place all using
        proprietary busses and interfaces.  HP disk throughput is VERY
        slow because it's over GPIB.  You also ~pretty~ much have to
        buy all peripherials from HP because of their packaging and
        interfaces. They even use some weird mouse that requires an
        "adapter" box to hook it up to their system. In retrospect, I
        like Sun hardware packaging, for desktop, deskside, and rack
        mountable systems. Sun is also expensive with peripherials (if
        you buy them from Sun), but we buy them much cheaper from
        third party vendors.

        Sun is very much on the leading edge in the UNIX kernel arena.
        SunOS 4.0 will have an all new memory management scheme, file
        mapping (great for those huge graphic data files), and shared
        libraries. They also have a butt-kicking window based source
        level debugger called dbxtool that make debugging a pure
        pleasure.

        I know BSD and SYSV are converging, but the last thing we need
        is another angle. HP-UX has a bunch of HP specific stuff in
        the kernel, utilities, and libraries that I think we could
        live without. I find BSD to be a superset of SYSV, so to me
        the logical approach is to take a BSD box and add SYSV
        extensions (the way Sun does it), not the other way around
        (the way ~I~ think HP has done it.)

        I know Sun keyboards aren't great, but no one I know has ever
        liked the HP keyboard. May seem trivial, but how do you think
        I'm typing this in ??  Every second you're on the computer,
        the keyboard is your most important tool.

        One area HP does shine in is sales and support. We've had
        LOUSY Sun sales reps right from day one. You can count on HP
        for that aspect.

        Well, I've probably said too much, but these are my
        thoughts/opinions.

Response #4:

             I was a programmer/support person for some HP9000/320s at
        Dept. And I've also worked a tiny bit on Suns, though mostly
        Sun-2s. The one thing I have to say about both systems are
        that the hard drives are incredibly flaky. Especially HP's
        equipment, we and other sites were constantly rebooting
        systems, and even replacing drives completely. Of about 50
        drives in use, left powered up twenty-four hours per day, we
        had a disk crash at least every other day. I'd guess we had to
        replace a drive entirely every other week, perhaps more often.
        I mean, we had bad drives stacked like cordwood.

             One definite cause was we originally had them too close
        to the workstations where users might bump them. Crashes
        dropped dramatically when we placed them more out of the way,
        though I still consider the failure rate absurd. Since the
        department head once worked for HP, and was tight enough with
        them to get all of that equipment donated to us, we were
        encouraged to keep our heads down about the matter. After all,
        HP did replace all of the bad drives free.

             One other point, I have been told, though I'm not sure
        how strongly I believe, that the flakiness of the drives was
        because HP farmed the manufacture of the drives out.
        Furthermore, a new subcontractor has taken over and is doing a
        much better job.

             Anyways, enough about them. On to Sun equipment. Sun too
        isn't exactly the stablest stuff. Their drives seemed to have
        too many failures, but what was really flaky were the video
        boards. To the point that we (and other sites) depleted not
        only our local supply of extras, but Sun ran short of them
        too.  This was all Sun-2 equipment, so they may have fixed the
        problem in later models.

             And on to what you probably really want to here:
        performance.  There, I can't really compare Sun-3s to HPs,
        since I never really worked on the Sun-3 that much. I will
        mention my thoughts on the HP, though. First off, the quality
        of the displays was superb. When I first saw someone plot
        something on these little CRTs that I *thought* was a standard
        monchrome, my jaw dropped out. And then we got the big 19"
        Trinitron color displays. Wow.

             Of course, you'll have to consider your own particular
        needs. We originally had four bitplanes of color. For CAD of
        VLSICs, no go. We upgraded to six, and pounded on the software
        a while, and voila'. I believe Sun has seven bit planes as the
        maximum in their machines.

             We also had a 68881 FP coprocessor in our machines, which
        helped things along nicely. Speaking of which, both the Sun-3
        and HP9000/320 have 68020s, but as anyone who has seen Hp's
        code can tell you, HP can't write software worth beans. I
        mean, they really stink at it. So I'm not suprised that their
        machine isn't anywhere near Sun's.  You of course have to
        consider other things, ie. memory wait states, etc.

             But back to HP-UX. It's sort of Berkeley 4.[12] and AT&T
        SysV mashed togther, and not very well. Some of the code is
        actually from SysIII. We at C-MU actually gave up, and ported
        Berkeley 4.2 BSD Unix to the things.  HP-UX is really pretty
        brain-damaged.

             For instance, they once decided for who knows what
        reason, to put both the swap and root portions of disk on the
        same partition.  Well, the swap area is the stuff most likely
        to get corrupted, ie.  trashed in a power glitch.  Being on
        the same partition as root, instead of it's own, meant that if
        it was corrupted, you lost the root information also. Which
        means you've lost the entire disk. Time to reformat. Never
        mind that you've still for the user information there, it's no
        good without the root partition. Don't ask me why, I thought
        we'd be able to get something back, but nope. No dice. It's
        all gone.

             Finally, I have to point out that I am a Berkeley Unix
        fan. SysV disgusts me. And HP-UX really gets me going. So
        consider all my comments with the knowledge that I prefer Sun
        simply because I hate SysV. And that is finally all I have to
        say. Sorry it's so long, but I figure you'll just pitch
        anything you aren't really concerned about.

Hope this summary is useful.

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Ephraim Silverberg,
Faculty of Biomedical Engineering,
Israel Institute of Technology,
Haifa, Israel.

BITNET  :        ephraim@techunix
ARPANET :        ephraim%techunix.bitnet@cunyvm.cuny.edu
CSNET   :        ephraim%techunix.bitnet@csnet-relay.csnet
UUCP    :        {ihnp4, allegra, rutgers}!psuvax1!techunix.bitnet!ephraim

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