Hm. I have found SUNs to be good (it was our NT view server that died over
new year's whereas our UNIX machines trotted along fine, even those that did
not get patched in time). They are stable and I find it is a lot easier to
find support for SUNs than any other UNIX platform - being a UNIX person, I
get frustrated with NT way more often than NT. yes, SUN is not perfect but
it best meets our needs as the VOB server.
the thing about having it on UNIX vs NT is that if you are supporting mixed
environment, UNIX VOBs can be used on NT clients but no NT VOB can be used
on UNIX clients.
SUNs are less expensive than HP for us (we lease SUNs and they are way
cheaper than what we get from HP). I am in the UNIX camp - we have to have
VOBs that are used on UNIX and NT. I have had too many NT machines die (2
clearcase view/vob servers in the last half year got to the point that we
had to get new NT machines to replace them - luckily the VOB on NT was
mainly for DOs).
I find SUNs to be easier to administer than HP (forget AIX - the bane of my
life and Compaq/DEC, which is not as painful as AIX), although there are
folks who feel the opposite (I do a lot of UNIX administration for the VOB
server and view servers at times) and way cheaper than HP. I would not
suggest SUN Ultra as a VOB server - you want a machine that can scale as you
grow. if your network has a 100BT or higher backplane, then go for 100BT
Ethernet.
we have roughly 200 people hitting our VOB server that holds roughly 20GB
total of VOBs. and we would never consider anything less than an E450 to
handle our load - my concerns is usually on disk I/O and network traffic,
not CPU usage since we do not compile on the VOB server. One office had an
Ultra 2 but it got too slow and too small for the user load of roughly 50-70
people hitting it.
-c
-----Original Message-----
From: Ron Natalie [mailto:ron@sensor.com
Sent: Thursday, January 20, 2000 10:01 AM
To: navjeet swatch
Cc: cciug@Rational.Com
Subject: Re: [cciug] Advice on choosing a UNIX server for Clearcase
navjeet swatch wrote:
>
>
> I have already obtained a quote for a used Sun UltraSPARC2 1200, 200MHz,
448
> MB RAM, 25GB HD. Does this spec sound about right based on the
requirements
> above ?
>
> I would prefer Sun as I get the impression that there is more Sun users
out
> there than most other makes of UNIX machine. Any opinions on that ?
>
I think that a Sun is an overpriced, low functionality, hard to support
platform, mostly do to the hardware itself (not that Solaris is any great
piece of software, don't get me started about their Y2K that breaks
working software).
What we have been using here for several years are PC's. We build up
nice "server" configuration Pentium boxes with fast raid disks. You can
actually build up several and have a complete hot spare for the price
of a single Sun system. Reasonable cpu performance, as much memory
as you can get, and fast disk/net performance is what you need. Actually,
clearcase isn't all that cpu intesive (it has some bottlenecks that
you are advised to avoid no matter what platform you are using).
If you're not into configuring it all yourself, you can even just call
up DELL and order one out of the box. Install UNIXWARE and CLEARCASE
and you're off and running.
We use UNIXWARE as the operating system which has been supported by
Rational for several years now. We have a few at 2.1 and one at 7.
Support out of SCO/NOVELL has been much better (not that we've needed
much).
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun May 06 2001 - 00:22:32 EDT