Re: Opinions Wanted on Oracle for NT

In article <01bc5723$11754060$7cfd00cf_at_hdaffin>, Xoltan <xoltan_at_usa.net> wrote:
>See below....
>
>Spencer Olson <spencer_olsen_at_ssb.com> wrote in article
><336A0594.4D68_at_ssb.com>...
>> Mark Wagoner wrote:
>> >
>> > Well, now that you have heard from the Unix bigots, here is a little
>> > unbiased opinion.
>> >
>> > We are an ISV offering an Oracle system on either HP/UX or NT 4.0 (yes,
>> > Oracle is certified on NT 4.0). We have 80 customers running NT and 5
>> > running HP/UX mostly because of the price/perfomance difference and
 ease of
>> > administration.
>>
>> Price performance, now that's rich. For an unbiased article on price
 performance and Windows NT/UNIX try
>> reading one of the new issues of LAN Times which indicates that UNIX not
>only outperforms NT, but is >cheaper!
>
>I would have to agree with Mark, if initial cost is a factor, definitely go
>with NT. I have been putting
>together some research myself trying to determine whether to go with NT or
>HP-UX. I have a
>administrative background with HP-UX. But hear my comments below...

Cost is somewhat irrelevant when one considers the price and availability of operating systems like Solaris x86. It is completely source compatible with Solaris Sparc, and has a more robust Unix environment when compared to NT. When you take into consideration the flexibility of Solaris over NT for tuning/scaling/administration, I would say that Soalris x86 and Oracle win hands down, for almost equal price, and Solaris definately has better performance and stability IMHO.

Additionally, I believe a few weeks ago, Oracle pointed out in some TPC-C benchmarks that Solaris X86 and Oracle far and away out performed some of Sun's higher systems. (At the time, Ultras were not considered, but I believe they were compared to dual CPU Sparc 20 machines.) The Intel machines were dual CPU P6-200. I'm sketchy on the amount of RAM.

Combine that with PCI SCSI disks, and performance is quite good.

>> And I would argue about the ease of adminstration. NT still lacks a
 robust scripting language which is the
>> backbone of most adminstration tasks. Thus you are confined (in NT) by
 what vendors supply what products and
>> have which features when it come to the day to day Oracle DB
 adminstration.
>>
>
>NT and UX have there adminstrative pitfalls. NT is VERY easy to administer
>from the disk/cpu side of it... but from the user side... go with unix. If
>you don't intend to place a lot of control over the users... NT is easy to
>fit for the job.

I don't understand your comment here. For users, NT may be easier, but a large number of NT servers are much more difficult to administer than the same number of Unix machines, and also one has to consider being able to manage these machines after hours and remotely. I believe Unix allows this easier than NT.

>> > Both the HP and the NT systems operate 24x7 and both have the exact
 same
>> > features. In addition to the database box, we also use either an NT or
 HP
>> > box as an application server, which may or may not be the same as the
>> > database box.
>>
>> I would have to concur with the earlier posted note. What would you want
 managing the flight instrumentation
>> on the plane you are flying in, NT or UNIX?
>>
>
>Both, I feel, are reliable OS's. But consider how long Unix has been
>about. It's only a matter of time
>for NT to be as robust as Unix. It is true that NT lacks the scripting
>ability of Unix... but when you add
>the public domain version of Perl scripting language... NT becomes very
>easy to script.

Trust your scripting in a production environment to a public domain scripting language? Don't get me wrong, I write plenty of Perl scripts, but for mission critical scripts, I want the OS vendor to be responsible and liable for the behaviour of my software. No, thank you.

>> > In short, if you need a quick install with minimal administrative
>> > maintenance and you are fairly small (100-200 users and < 50G data), NT
 is
>> > a more cost-effective approache. If you already have the Unix
>> > infrastructure and are planning to go large scale, use Unix.
>> >
>> Anyone heard of an NT box, with 200 concurrent users, and 50GB of data?
 I did not think so. Also, if you
>> have the need for 200 users, 50GB of data, and you think that the
 administration needs are going to be
>> minimal, I am both confounded and amazed by your audacity!
>>
>
>I had to laugh at the 100-200 user comment. I would say that any well
>configured NT box could not
>handle that number of concurrent users. Unix does this well. In my
>opinion, NT was not intended to
>do so. NT is geared towards client-server... and "clients", depending on
>the software being used,
>would have less impact then concurrent 'on-line' users. But that is with
>ANY OS... NT or Unix.

True enough, scale the solution to the problem. I do thing, however that for price/performance/reliability Solaris x86 should be considered as an alternative environment to NT, and comes with many more features in it's server variant than NT. It comes with disk management software which supports RAID-5 and Mirroring (Solstice Disk Suite), tape backup software (Solstice Backup Suite), administrative tools (Solstice Admin Suite), along with complete online documentation (Answer Books). The server package is also licensed for unlimited users, NT server is restricted. The price for Solaris x85 Application Server is $695 from EIS computers.

There are also a number of other features available in Solaris x86 which make it superior to NT, like 64 bit asynchronous kernel IO, and release 2.6 will be full a full 64 bit opertaing system. I think, again price/performance one should examine Solaris x86 seriously.

>We went with the NT box running Oracle.
>
>Stay tuned.
 

-- 
Michael P. Sullivan                                           PP-ASMEL/IA
Aero-Vision Technologies, Inc.                             Skylane N52792
E-Mail: msullivan_at_ACM.org  or  mps_at_aero-vision.com    Phone: 516-952-3516
  * UNIX Systems and Database Consulting, Architecture and Management *