Date: Fri, 22 May 1998 19:52:09 -0600 (MDT) From: allen campbell <allenc@verinet.com> To: jkh@time.cdrom.com Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Enough already! (Re: Why we should support Microsoft...) Message-ID: <199805230152.TAA09147@const.> In-Reply-To: <26954.895770070@time.cdrom.com>
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> > NT is just plain NOT READY YET, a fact which most admins who've > attempted to seriously deploy it in the field are well aware of, and > by pushing it into places where it's not appropriate to push it yet, > M$ is doing an excellent job of shooting their feet off. > [snip] As a rule I avoid these threads, however, I witnessed something that I simply must share. With your invocation of 'most admins', this seems as good a place as any. I attended the spring OAUG (Oracle Applications User Group) conference is San Diego earlier this week. This is a bi-annual gathering of 8000+ OAUG members and several hundred vendors. For a few days we dominate the convention center and every significant hotel in San Diego :) As a financial application developer I attend this approximately once a year. On Tuesday, I attended a session intended to convey the latest news on Oracle Apps v11 deployment (Apps is short for Oracle Applications; a large suite of business software.) Near the latter part of this session the presenter was asked if Oracle had published any benchmark results on v11, and specifically if there had been any benchmarks done to compare NT performance to that of the many UNIX platforms Oracle supports. The speaker knew of no such benchmark data from Oracle and hesitated in sharing her own experiences as an applications consultant. I guess she realized she had no particular stake in the matter and decided to share her beliefs anyhow. She stated that for her own purposes, production systems were deployed on UNIX and that for a given machine, UNIX will always perform faster serving the applications suite. At this, a large percentage of the room of maybe 1800 people began a loud and sustained applause. Mind you, these are system administrators, applications developers and consultants who, in most cases, care not a wit what platform the underlying database happens to be running on. They have learned through their own individual experience what gets the job done and they know it is not NT. The presenter was taken off guard by this reaction. She jokingly asked the crowd if we had applauded because of her courage in sharing this or because we agreed with her. I'm proud to say I was one of a handful who answered 'both.' :) The fact is that outside of Microsoft, the world knows damn well NT doesn't cut it. The IT professionals in that room are quick to warm up to whatever system will provide the reliability and efficiency they need to run a business. You see, in the sort of environments where Oracle Apps is deployed, you let that system crash and you get a call from a vice president. You get that call with any sort of frequency and you walk. A crash is something that gets analyzed and explained, not accepted. In these environments, IT people have comparatively little loyalty to specific vendors or platforms; they can't afford it. They purchase big, strong database hardware from a multitude of vendors including HP, Digital, IBM and Sun. Despite this diverse market the one common thread for most of us is UNIX. In my shop, NT is a toy not to be called upon for anything more significant than a small modem pool or a workstation that crashes less than Windows 95. We don't have the time, budget, or motivation to perform the back-flips necessary to make NT perform like UNIX. -- Allen Campbell allenc@verinet.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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