Openserver vs. Unixware
Terry Hubbard
I seek opinions on which OS to use for a new installation. My current
experience with SCO is very limited but the decision to go with SCO is
pretty well cast in stone, it is just a matter of either openserver
enterprise or unixware 2.1. Pros, Cons etc.....
All replies appreciated......
Bela Lubkin
Terry Hubbard wrote:
> I seek opinions on which OS to use for a new installation. My current
> experience with SCO is very limited but the decision to go with SCO is
> pretty well cast in stone, it is just a matter of either openserver
> enterprise or unixware 2.1. Pros, Cons etc.....
Should I get a motorcycle or a pair of skis?
In other words, give your readers some hint of what you intend to do
with the operating system. What sort of environment it will be used in,
for what purpose, what kind of hardware, software, will you be buying a
support contract, will this be a single installation or 14000 replicated
sites, etc.
>Bela<
Evan Leibovitch
In article <970108015...@father.pdev.sco.com>,
Bela Lubkin <be...@sco.COM> wrote:
>Terry Hubbard wrote:
>> I seek opinions on which OS to use for a new installation. My current
>> experience with SCO is very limited but the decision to go with SCO is
>> pretty well cast in stone, it is just a matter of either openserver
>> enterprise or unixware 2.1. Pros, Cons etc.....
>Should I get a motorcycle or a pair of skis?
Fair enough. Just remember that your vendor, which makes both the
motorcycle and the skis, has said that the two items will soon be
merged together. The resulting product will look mostly like a
motorcycle, but has skis bolted to the sides so that skiers are
not scared away.
Assuming the hardware and end-user application(s) you want to run are
supported on both platforms, choose UnixWare mainly for two reasons;
- Quite simply, its performance is better. UnixWare is SCO's Aim
benchmark winner, not OpenServer; and UnixWare's SMP and multi-thread
efficiency is said to be amongst the best-designed of any OS;
- SCO's stated future, the merged product now known as Gemini,
is far more based on UnixWare than OpenServer. The UnixWare
user of today will have less of a culture shock upgrading to
Gemini than the OpenServer user.
--
Evan Leibovitch, Sound Software Ltd, located in beautiful Brampton, Ontario
Supporting PC-based Unix since 1985 / Caldera & SCO authorized / www.telly.org
I sometimes think of Unix as the Cabbage Patch Operating System -- A. Tannenbaum
Bela Lubkin
Terry Hubbard wrote:
> Okay, this will be a single system supporting 100 or so concurrently online
> users running an in house written character based application. The hardware
> under consideration is a quad processor pentium pro(200) system with 512 to
> 1gb of ram, 17g disk. The database will be odbc connected to a system of pc
> running windows nt for report writing purposes. Most users will be using
> character based terminals(vt100) connected to the system via a term server.
> There is an inhouse netware 4.11 file server running financial apps that
> while they dont need to see the main database, it would be nice to be able
> to share printers. The main database consumes about 7gb of disk although
> the largest single file is about 600mb. Minimizing downtime is important so
> speed of recovery is a factor. Say a power failure(system will be ups
> protected) brings down the system, would the journaling filesystem in
> unixware permit a faster restart that the HTFS filesystem in sco openserver
> 5.0.2.
This is actually exactly the sort of application that both OSes excel
at. Evan makes some good points in UW's favor, which I will not
dispute.
It sounds like you are planning to throw an appropriate level of
hardware at the problem.
At a guess, the described hardware and either OS will perform extremely
well at this task. I suggest you get ahold of one or more third party
performance tools (e.g. sarcheck, SCO Doctor, Olympus Tuneup, Stallion
Monitor) as part of your initial system installation. Then if
performance is unsatisfactory, you'll have great tools available
immediately. Otherwise there is a small but significant chance that the
system will get bottlenecked on one small area, leaving you mystified.
The point I'm trying to make is, once you've put it together, if it
*doesn't* *fly*, look for a smoking gun.
>Bela<
Terry Hubbard
Bela Lubkin <be...@sco.COM> wrote in article
<970108015...@father.pdev.sco.com>...
> Terry Hubbard wrote:
>
> > I seek opinions on which OS to use for a new installation. My current
> > experience with SCO is very limited but the decision to go with SCO is
> > pretty well cast in stone, it is just a matter of either openserver
> > enterprise or unixware 2.1. Pros, Cons etc.....
>
> Should I get a motorcycle or a pair of skis?
>
Okay, this will be a single system supporting 100 or so concurrently online
users running an in house written character based application. The hardware
under consideration is a quad processor pentium pro(200) system with 512 to
1gb of ram, 17g disk. The database will be odbc connected to a system of pc
running windows nt for report writing purposes. Most users will be using
character based terminals(vt100) connected to the system via a term server.
There is an inhouse netware 4.11 file server running financial apps that
while they dont need to see the main database, it would be nice to be able
to share printers. The main database consumes about 7gb of disk although
the largest single file is about 600mb. Minimizing downtime is important so
speed of recovery is a factor. Say a power failure(system will be ups
protected) brings down the system, would the journaling filesystem in
unixware permit a faster restart that the HTFS filesystem in sco openserver
5.0.2.
p.s. take the motorcycle