Can a Sun-3/260 do the work of an 8600?

[whm at megaron.UUCP]

I had an opportunity to run some benchmarks on a Sun-3/260 and an 8600.
The Sun seems to stack up pretty well against the big boy; for the entire
suite the VAX took about 25 minutes of real time and the Sun took about 30,
if I believe what I'm reading.

I believe that for equivalently configured systems with about 1G of disk
and 16M, the list price of the VAX is about 3-4 times that of the Sun.
When I ponder the price/performance ratio of the two machines, I have to
wonder under what conditions one might select an 8600 (or 8500 or 8700)
instead of a Sun-3/200.  Well, you can't run VMS on a Sun, but that reason
is not of interest to me.  If you buy a Sun-3/200 instead of an 8600,
you're probably going to have a couple $100k left over, but if you've got
to spend the money, you could buy a couple more Sun-3/200s.

Based on my benchmarks, I'm convinced that if you're going to be using
the system as a workstation, the Sun has just as much power as the VAX.
However, the multiuser performance question is really the one that
I'm interested in.  For a specific question, if you put 20 busy users
on a Sun-3/260, would it hold up as well as an 8600?  Is anyone doing this
now?  Does anyone plan to do this?  Has anyone cancelled their order for
an 8000-series VAX and ordered a Sun-3/200 series machine instead?
If you know the answers to these or similar questions, I'd love to hear
from you.

On a somewhat related topic, does anyone know if Sun has ever given any
thought to making their UNIX available for VAXs?  Sure, you can get 4.3
from UCB, 4.3+NFS from Mt. Xinu, and Ultrix from DEC, but we've got a
load of Suns and VAXs and it certainly would be nice to be running the
same UNIX on both machines.  Obviously, there's a lot of stuff that would
be N/A on the VAX, but it would certainly be the system of choice for me
since I'm going to be working on both VAXs and Suns.  I think it would be
a logical choice for sites that have Suns and who are looking for a vendor-
maintained UNIX for their VAXs.

					Bill Mitchell
					U of Arizona CS Dept.
					whm at arizona.edu (preferred)
					{ihnp4,noao,mcnc,utah-cs}!arizona!whm
					IPC: 602-621-6613