Academic workstations

[Bruce G. Barnett]

In article <3160 at sun.soe.clarkson.edu>, abstine at sun (Arthur Stine) writes:
>
>One cannot realize the maximum potential of the
>higher performance workstation by using them as a diskless workstation.

I question this statement. See below.

>Here at Clarkson University, we have a number of Sun workstations (3/50's,
>3/60's, 386i's) which are served off of a couple of 3/260 servers. The 3/50's
>are primarily diskless, but the others all have local disk.

I would say you have your machines configured backwards.
The 3/50's need the disk because they are the ones most likely
to page, and if they have local disks, they won't flood the network.

>Performance
>is adaquete for the diskless workstations, but when the network becomes
>heavily used, the diskless stations feel the pinch.

I would say you have a network configuration problem.

>Diskless only stations (in my opinion) are the wave of the past. Without
>higher bandwidth networks, they have become throttled by the available
>network technology.

I will agree that an application that has to work with a lot of data
(Image processing, etc) will need a fast disk.

We have 300 Sun's here, and 80-90% are diskless.  They are all on a single
Ethernet (with several seqments and smart bridges).

If a machine is slow,  we add more memory. If we can't (like a Sun 3/50),
we try to add a local SCSI disk to eliminate the swaping.

Some high end servers have their own disk, that's true.
But with the coming of network window systems, and diskless machines with 64
megabytes of memory, I do not agree with your statement about diskless
machines being passe.

In our experience, we see a continued use of diskless workstations.
If we had to convert over to diskfull workstations, we would have to
double or triple the support staff needed to keep them all running.

--
Bruce G. Barnett	<barnett at crdgw1.ge.com>  a.k.a. <barnett@[192.35.44.4]>
			uunet!crdgw1.ge.com!barnett barnett at crdgw1.UUCP