Re: PC server vs. Sun server

In article <34903c3d.13363976_at_waubel.wau.mis.ah.nl>, Kaboel Karso <kaboel_at_wau.mis.ah.nl> wrote:
>Hi,
>
>In general you can't say this platform is better than that one. It all
>depends on the business needs you have. I've used Oracle on SUN6000's
>and smaller (all Solaris), on Intel platform (Netware, NT and
>Solaris).
>
>I still advise small shops to use NT if unix expertise is not
>available. Where scalability is NOT an issue, other reasons might.

This is good advise if NT fits the requirements. I would in most cases agree with this advice.

>Right now I'm sort of looking after 650 (remote) sites with Oracle on
>Intel Solaris ranging from Pentium 60 to 133Mhz, running almost
>unattended.

We do a similar thing with telco stats systems the numbers of systems are much smaller - but we have sometime less that 15 minutes to fix a problem before the next poll - and lost polled data is lots revenue!

We have had no problems with unixen (mainly suns) but on out dual pent machine the eval copies of Oracle have all suffered from growing TEMP tablespace and freqent reboots. One big problem is that if we install some of the later service packs It affects our application software. The only response we have had to this problem is tough - so for the moment we are SOL :-(

>I'm investigating the use of the Oracle Intelligent Agent with Oracle
>Enterprise Manager and SUN's master agent. The idea is to have the
>database alerts trapped by the master agent, which takes care of
>sending it via snmp over the wan to the Solstice Enterprise Manager.

Hmmm.

We looked at similar solutions for a high-end PDB solution for a prospective customer. We could not recommend NT at the time as it would only scale to handling the output of around 2-3 exchanges. The PDB solution we came up with tested out at being able to handle well over 40 exchanges. The custoemr went with the NT solution. We expect them to call us sometime next year when the 4th exchange goes on line... :-)

>remarks:
>1. If the db crawls on a dual proc Proliant, you might reconsider your
>design

If a database crawls at any time, design, tuning, platform, etc should all be reconsidered :-)

>2. The Oracle I installed on Netware was very fast Unix couldn't beat
>it on similar hardware.

Scalability - there are multiple unix vendors offering oracle PDB solutions

• I have not yet seen NT as a PDB option.

>3. A Proliant is hardly a Personal Computer anymore

Depends :-)

Compared to the hardware I was used to in my previous job even sun E3000's are desktop boxes. I know of some banks that have multiprocessor high-end ultras on each desktop.

So, the datum for comparison depend upon your viewpoint. (It used to be less than 50 Gigaflop = desktop power)

i.e. Create/write/read/delete a 40gig file many times per second was a standard disk array test.

NT is getting there - it is a good solution for low end systems but some of the nagging problems with soem core functionality (such as the select problem) mean that NT is IMHO not stable for some of the applications that we are involved in. Having said that, NT seems to have become more stable since the early NT3 releases. It can only get better :-)

Jacqui

-- 
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