In article <dVRxf.22831$W03.758356@news20.bellglobal.com>,
Steve <as@joe.ca> wrote:
>Thanks for replying. Our software provider who wants to sell us the new
>server, recommend a 2 processor Server because we are expieriencing problem
>with the performance of our current server which is in a 100 or so user
>environment. He tells us that a 2 processor server with Unixware 7, SMP and
>Hypertreading would make that server very performant. But, another server
>reseller told me that there is not much difference between OPSR5 and
>Unixware 7 when it comes time to work with a 2 processor beast. Do you think
>that's right? I mean do we really have to upgrade to version 7?
>
>By the way, our software provider wants to sell us an Acer Altos G710 3.6
>Xeon server. I got another quote from some else for an HP Proliant ML 350
>3.4 Xeon which is cheaper than Acer's. Which one woud you recommend?

Well you left out some important information here.

And that is the application you are using. Those can affect
performance greatly.

When I made the earlier reply I didn't indicate the size of the
moved system. It was about 120 users with about 70 printers
configured in with at least two printers in of 22 remote locations.

That system went from regular P III's to Xeons and the built in
cache on the Xeons and the additional CPU performance took the end
of the week run down from 2.5 hours to about 10 minutes.

Whether hyper-threading will help or not will depend on the
application to a great extent.

However before you move to whatever platform it is, do yourself
a favor and run disk i/o benchmarks and timings of things you run
all the time and save those.

If the performance then doesn't measure up to what the sales-droids
tell you you have some ammunition.

In the system I noted one of the support people recommended
something that I considered wrong. He made some comment about how
he knew Unix as he'd seen the source code. I questioned him on that
and it turns out the sources he'd seen were Linux.

The owners of the above new SCO and trusted it - and the vendor
advised all users with more than 16 users that needed to go to IBM
machines and run AIX. When the SCO people checked with others at
a users convention, it turns out they were the largest user in the
country - be it AIX or SCO. With that they learned to check with
outside sources whenever the SW vendor suggested something that
cost money.

In many instances SW/computer vendors have a poorer reputation than
lawyers or used-car salesmen.

Ask your SW vendor to give you names of others using the systems so
you can ask them.

I don't want to come across too negative but I've seen too many
people recommneding things not because the customer needed them but
because they could make more money selling hardware too.

Color me very cynical.

Bill




>
>"Bob Bailin" <72027.3605@compuserve.com> a écrit dans le message de
>news:1TQxf.440$NS6.252@newssvr30.news.prodigy.com ...
>>
>> "Steve" <as@joe.ca> wrote in message
>news:fVNxf.20754$W03.734834@news20.bellglobal.com ...
>> > Hi,
>> >
>> > We have to replace our current Unix SCO Open serveur 5.0.6 with a new 2
>> > processors Xeon Server. I,ve been told to upgrade Unix to Unixware 7 to
>take
>> > advantage of the 2 processor hardware feature because it handles it
>better
>> > than SCO Open Server 5. The main app runs with Informix database. So it
>is
>> > true that Unixware is better with a 2 processor Server than version 5?
>>
>> Wow, this sounds like the setup for a marketing pitch for OpenServer 6.0!
>>
>> "All the benefits of Unixware 7 in a familiar, easy-to-use OpenServer 5
>> user interface." You sound like the perfect upgrade candidate.
>>
>> Seriously, you might want to obtain an OSR6 media kit and explore its
>possibilities.
>> Just don't deploy it until Maintenance Pack 2 is released "real soon now."
>>
>> Yes, it will probably perform better than OSR5, because more kernel and
>> driver routines are written to be multi-threaded, but do you really need
>this
>> incremental performance boost? Do you currently have SMP and a 2-CPU
>> system? Why do you need to upgrade?
>>
>> Bob
>>
>>
>
>


--
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com