Information sought on Solbourne Computers -- summary

[Ron Baxter]

Thanks for all the replies, I have edited what follows quite a bit, but
think the important comments remain.
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jas at proteon.com (John A. Shriver):

The Solbourne is ultimately nothing more than a parallel processor version
of the Sun-4/260.  I can't see that parallel processing (asymmetric, I
think) is going to help worth a squat on file service, since that's all
kernel processing.
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Chuck Musciano <chuck%trantor.harris-atd.com at munnari.oz>:

The Solbourne is priced about 25% lower than the equivalent Sun machine,
and is completely binary compatible.  It runs a licensed copy of SunOS,
right from Sun.

Consider this, though: Sun is not stupid.  They would not license their
product to another company who is undercutting them by 25% unless they
were ready to roll out significant price/performance improvements in the
near future.  Wait for the February product announcements that were hinted
at at the Miami SUG.  I predict you'll find a better, cheaper machine to
meet your needs.
__________

daw at Sun.COM (Doug Ward):

If you are talking about buying a complete new machine, I as a Sun
employee would prefer to see you buy Sun, of course (we're all very loyal
here, since we're all stockholders as well;-)), but Solbourne could mostly
fill the bill.  I believe most applications will work transparently, but
the kernel is somewhat different.  In particular, since they have
multiprocessors, they have already or will in the future be making a
number of kernel modifications to synchronize between processors.  This
will affect among other things, device drivers.

So I would not expect third party hardware which comes complete with
drivers to necessarily work.  At the least I'd question Solbourne closely
about that before buying *if* you are apt to be in the market for that
sort of thing.
__________

siedelbe at stout.UCAR.EDU (Mike Siedelberg):

<..introduces himself as a potential customer who has visited Solbourne>

Some things I can say:  They use their own proprietary bus for their main
boards, which is quite high bandwidth.  They support normal VME boards on
a seven slot bus.  The only disk system available from them at this time
is SCSI bus stuff.  They can run two CPUs, but one is strictly a slave of
the first and cannot be scheduled or maninpulated in any way, but this
will change in the future.  They plan soon to go to the cypress gate
arrays (as does sun), which will supposedly give twice the normal sun 4
performance.
__________

Anne Skamarock <godzilla!skam at boulder.colorado.edu>:

<.. introduces herself as a Solbourne employee>

1.  Compatibility
Solbourne, though it's often coined "Sun Clone" is NOT a clone, in the
sense that Compaq was/is an IBM clone, but is a compatible workstation.
The importance of this distinction is that we claim binary compatibility
down to the system call interface (as you might expect as we offer a
master/slave multiprocessing configuration).  So, any program that adheres
to that interface will run (we haven't found one that hasn't yet) BUT if
your programs bypass the syscall interface and poke directly at the
hardware, there will be problems.

2.  Third Party Programs
We are working very hard with third party vendors to qualify their
software on our machine.  As a new company, we still have a long way to go
to build up a base like that of Sun's but, so far, we've had no trouble
with the applications not being able to run...  More a matter of being
licensed to run on our machine.

3.  Peripherals
We currently offer SCSI disks and SCSI tape.  We have announced support
for SMD disks in a deskside pedestal arrangement.  We do not currently
support any more than 2 serial lines but it's something that I feel we
NEED to provide.

< .. hype about customer support deleted>

__________

Ron Baxter, CSIRO Div Maths & Stats,
PO Box 218, Lindfield, NSW, Australia.
Phone:	+61 2 467 6059		
Email:	ronb at natmlab.oz.au