In defense of SUN (a little)

[Barry Shein]

As I have mentioned before on this list Computer Science here has
sold their VAX/780 running 4.2bsd and replaced it with two SUN/3s.
In brief, one SUN/3 might have been enough, splitting to two systems
has largely reduced load across the two systems to 1.0 or less all
day, this system is quite fast (typically we have 12-16 interactive
users all afternoon per SUN.) A CRITICAL FACTOR IS MEMORY, 4MB IS
NOT ENOUGH, when we went to 8MB (so far, on one of the systems) it
helped dramatically. Memory is pretty cheap anyhow, this is a bad
place to skimp. I still intend to write up our experiences, I have
about twenty requests to do so from the net and the story is more
involved than this paragraph indicates, but the bottom line is I
feel like I made a good decision (maybe a great decision.)

Now for the flames about delivery etc. I agree, delivery is tough,
we have experienced a lot of what people have mentioned. I could
chalk it up to life in the fast lane, look, we don't have our 180s
yet (this week?) we are temporarily using 160s. Think about it,
we replaced our big 780 with a little box that slips under a table
in our machine room and it was a significant upgrade in power (as
opposed to many other boxes that claim at best to be about the same
as a 780.) This is both CPU and I/O as far as I can tell, about 4X
CPU and 2X I/O (maybe a little more) across the two systems.

Hey guys, this is a brand new product, remember those one year
long delivery queues from some of the big vendors, everyone here
is grumbling about 90 days or so. I think the biggest mistake SUN
is making is not communicating to their sales people what can and
cannot be done, I think *this* is the serious problem if any, too
many promises (I immediately sensed that some of what our salesman
was saying sounded a little unrealistic.)

The pressure for these systems from SUN seems to be enormous, maybe
bigger than you think. For example, Computervision has re-worked
their entire product line around them and is probably eating up
hundreds if not more of these per month. Their CAD/CAM systems
apparently won't run w/o memory expansions, so memory expansions
have gotten a little scarce this month. You can imagine the pressure
from an OEM like that, from everything I have heard about CV, their
life is on the line in getting these products to their customers
(and personally I think CV is about to 'make it'.) Kodak is also
apparently OEM'ing the boxes. Universities, from what I hear, are
ordering these things by the dozens, hundreds and in one rumored
case THOUSANDS, yes THOUSANDS, tho over some time.

Like I said, life in the fast lane. We may have bought into a
company that is suffering from one of the biggest successes in
this industry in history. It's not surprising there are a few
growth pains. At least, I'm not surprised (consider that up to
before the SUN/3 the total installed base was about 15,000, there
are almost surely more SUN/3s on order right this minute.)

And as far as I can tell, the delivery delays will be a nuisance,
but nothing amazing. Hell, one very big vendor was supposed to
deliver my student time-sharing system July 1 so I could set it
up for students over the summer. I figured some slippage, of course
it showed up the day before classes!

There's nothing new under the sun...

	-Barry Shein, Boston University

Apologies in advance if any of my details here are a little inaccurate,
consider it proof that I am only a customer of SUN and have no other
interest or special inside line to information. If it makes a difference
I have in the past worked on projects with Computervision and will
probably do so again in the near future, but I doubt that had much
to do with this discussion except to provide an example.