UNIX Competition
Steve, remember the Sun/ATT and 386/SCO UNIX competition? Sun/ATT won on
both price and performance. Performance sure, you say, but price?
Do you know the Sun line? For our basic machine, we settled on the Sun IPC,
a 25 MHz SPARC workstation with 8 MB RAM, 207 MB Hard Drive, 1.44MB floppy,
and 16" color (1152*900, 8-bit color) monitor with Open Windows, AutoCad,
and Ingres as the starter software. Sun's price was about $7700 a station.
I could not duplicate the setup on a name brand 386 for less than $9500. A
386 server was cheaper than a Sun 330 server by about $8000, but I broke
even on the fifth workstation. (Our initial order is for the 330 server, 2
SPARC 1+'s, and 6 IPC's). The SPARC 1+'s will be mini-servers for future
IPC clusters, so they figured in differently ($4,000 cheaper than a 386
server).
The price comparison was based on ISA and EISA machines with 386/387 chips
running at least 20 Mhz and other features comparable to the Suns from
Compaq, Unisys, and H-P.
Since we were working with loaner equipment; I was able to avoid actually
buying any of the 386's. As a result of other performance anomalies
relating to specific 386 boxes, we also cancelled all pending and future
orders for MSDOS machines.
Just thought you'd like to know, Rob.