A choice to be made

[Maurice Sharp]

I have a decision to make on Sun vs. Apollo.  I would like comments from
the Sun crew as to why I should buy it.  I realize that SPARC stations are
cheap, but I could get good performance from a DN10000 and a few DN2500's
for less.  Is Sun coming out with a 10000 competitor ?  What about NFS, I
have been told that it is very buggy and very slow.  What kind of built in
distributed processing paradigm is there ?  How close to BSD4.3 (NOT
sys5.3 :-() is the OS ?  What is administration like ?

Here at the U. I have administered Apollos (a dream, they take care of
themselves, if only we knew about the damn patches !!).  I have used suns
(from 3/50's to Sparcstation 1's).  I like SunView for the display
paradigm (Postscript).  I have found NFS to be singularly unreliable and
the sys5.3/bsd4.3 mix to be a royal pain.  I was also most unhappy with OS
4.0 (as were our sys admins).  On the other hand, 10.1 has not been a
dream either.

I am not posting this to start a Sun vs. Apollo war !  I want truthful,
reasonably unbiased views from current users and especially current
administrators.

Please EMAIL me your replies, I would rather not troll through the
newgroup, and this way I can post summaries.