Re: Help choose Unix: Solaris or HPUX or AIX or ???

From: Doug Freyburger (dfreybur_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 06/14/04 

Date: 14 Jun 2004 08:21:18 -0700

root2038@yahoo.com wrote:
>
> I have very little experience with the candidates, so I need your help
> to pick up the Unix HW/flavor. It will run a 80Gb DB. DB engine is
> Informix IDS 9.x. It should support 64 bit architecture. LVM is very
> desirable. The system will be used by approximately 400-500 users.

How important is performance vs software maintainability?

If you want the best software support rather than the most
performance, go ask on some Informix newsgroups what systems
the best support is on, or even what system is their primary
support base that they use in development. Pick that one.

> I'm probably looking at a 4 CPU system with at least 4Gb of RAM, about
> 150-200Gb of mirrored SCSI drives for the file system and the DB. This
> system should have some room to grow - a couple of extra CPU sockets,
> a couple of extra RAM slots, etc.

All 3 vendors do that. All of that stuff has been old-hat for
all Unix vendors for years. You're talking about a rather
small Unix server as the currently shipped disks are in the
100+ GB range.

> Please tell pros and cons for the Unices I specified. Or maybe you
> think there is a better choice. What would you choose and why. I'm
> also interested to hear your comments on native vs non-native hardware
> (AFAIK Solaris can run on AMD as well), costs, support, anything that
> you think is worth mentioning.

Native has the edge in maintenance. One company to go to.

For raw performance, HP and IBM usually pursue that more than Sun.
Sun usually pursues smaller servers at lower prices. Even if
your chosen Sun model outperforms this year when the next
technology refresh comes they won't.

If price is the priority Sun is probably the way to go, though
IBM has been pushing price low on a few of their models recently.
But it's best to take a long term view: If Sun usually beats the
others on price then IBM beating Sun on price is a this-year-only
deal and when you inevitably refresh the technology it won't be
true then because it usually hasn't been true.

Staffing ease can't possibly be an issue for you, so you can't
use that as your basis. Informix is a small market share
database so you're already stuck with specialists to run it.
So even though you asked about the relative merits of the
operating system from each vendor, that is secondary to your
real decision needs at this point. They're all Unix when it
comes down to it. The differences are there but they are much
smaller than the similarities.

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