Altos 5000

[Ti Kan]

In article <1990Aug28.064145.26246 at fiver> palowoda at fiver (Bob Palowoda) writes:
>  This is what I think alot of customers want to hear. For example they 
>want to know exactly what makes your disk cacheing/mirroring is better 
>and more reliable than lets say DPT's or someone elses. You have to
>give the customer something to measure the quality of your product 
>against.  

Okay, let me be a little more specific.  Since Altos UNIX is SCO-compatible,
I'll do direct comparisons, and give some examples to back up my comments.
I don't know as much about ISC UNIX as I do about SCO's, so I'll refrain
from comparing again ISC UNIX.  Altos has invested in excess of 250 man
years developing the Altos 5000 software and hardware, so I hope those man
years weren't for nothing :-).

First, let's compare features:
1. SCO UNIX (3.2.2) supports a max of 4 SCSI hard disks on a system.
   Altos has upped that limit to 30.  I think that most will agree
   that for a large UNIX file server, 4 disks is inadequate.  Moreover,
   On the Altos 5000 the hard disks are controlled via either the Base
   I/O board (1 SCSI channel) or the HPFP (High performance file processor
   -- up to 4 SCSI channels).  The Base I/O board has a very fast
   TI SCSI controller chip.  The HPFP has an onboard CPU that offloads
   the main CPU in interrupt handling, as well as possessing intelligence
   like job combining, etc.  This is important as the number of disks
   is increased.  All Altos SCSI disk drivers are optimized via fine-tuned
   disk request sorting algorithms, scatter/gather I/O, etc. These
   factors greatly improves disk performance, as can be seen in disk-
   intensive benchmark results.
2. Altos disk striping and disk mirroring is implemented in the UNIX
   kernel.  SCO has no such support in its UNIX release.  Disk striping
   provides tremendous gains in performance, especially if there are
   more disks involved.  With 4 disks striped on an HPFP board,
   we observed close to 4x improvement in the disk-intensive Neal Nelson
   benchmark test 18 running at 60 copies (compared to a single disk).
   With more disks, the improvement is even more impressive (almost
   linear wrt the number of disks).
   As for disk mirroring, in my experience the disk controllers are
   typically far more reliable than the disk drives themselves.  We
   offer a (relatively inexpensive) way to increase disk reliability
   (what we call "fault resilience") for those who need it.  If you
   want full fault tolerance, you'll have to pay tremendously more for
   true fault tolerant systems that the Altos 5000 isn't.
3. Altos UNIX allows you to connect up to 512 RS232 serial devices, via
   the Altos MDC/2 board and TCU/2 (terminal cluster units).  SCO has no
   such support.  Again, high performance serial connectivity is important
   in a large UNIX installation.  Again, the SIO/2 (8-ports) and MDC/2
   (up to 512 ports) boards have on board CPUs that greatly reduces the
   load on the main CPU.  Port configuration is handled via Altos' new
   port configuration utility ("pcu") which allows easy configuration
   of all serial/parallel ports for terminal/printer/modem in a menu-
   driven, visual environment.  It even displays the correct station-
   address switch settings of all the TCUs so they can be easily set up.
4. Altos UNIX is optimized for an EISA bus architecture (as opposed to
   an ISA bus).  Since our SIO/2, MDC/2, HPFP, and Base I/O boards are
   all 32-bit EISA boards, this is an important consideration.  There
   are numerous places in the UNIX kernel where we have made special
   adjustments to make it run better in an EISA environment (I can't
   cite specifics).  In addition, we provide "uconfig", a utility that
   is the UNIX back-end of the EISA configuration utility front-end
   (that comes with EISA systems).  The EISA configuration utility
   configures the hardware so that the sysadmin does not have to worry
   about hardware resource conflicts (IRQs, I/O ports, memory, and DMA),
   and uconfig re-configures the UNIX kernel and drivers to match (sysadmin
   does not have to hack the /etc/conf directory).
5. Altos UNIX kernel is more optimized for larger UNIX systems, compared
   to SCO.  Many of its tuneable parameters and non-tuneable internal
   parameters and structures have been adjusted to suit 100+ users.  Altos
   UNIX supported 256MB since day one, even though the 5000 hardware
   currently supports up to 64MB.  New versions of the Altos EISA systems
   will soon support 128MB-256MB, and will have the 33MHz or 50MHz version
   of the 486 CPU.  In contrast, SCO had just broken the 16MB barrier with
   its 3.2.2 release, and how much memory can your XYZ PC support?
6. Altos has also fixed several bugs inherent in the 386 UNIX source
   code that caused performance penalties.  I cannot reveal what these
   are because they are proprietary information.

Now the "intangibles":
1. On many occasions when we qualify OEM hardware (for example,
   SCSI disks and tape drives) we find problems in compatibility.  For
   example, the 525MB cartridge tape drive took many revisions to its
   firmware before it became bug-free enough to pass Altos requirements.
   Also, some SCSI disk drives have timing characteristics that does not
   work with the existing controller hardware (and required a change to
   the disk drive hardware).  Instead of asking the the VAR or the
   customer to integrate pieces of hardware and software that may not
   work optimally together, Altos has provided a tested and proven
   platform, engineered from the start to work together.
2. Since the software and hardware are all from Altos, we can provide
   superior support for our VARS and customers.  Altos' technical
   support team has been specifically trained to handle the Altos
   systems.  If one had bought an XYZ PC with SCO UNIX, and expansion
   boards and device drivers from 5 other vendors, he/she might find
   no useful help from any of them when problems arise.
3. Since Altos builds turn-key solutions, you don't have to go to another
   vendor to acquire networking connectivity and other applications.
   Altos ships a very large selection of local area network and wide
   area network products, office automation applications, languages, and
   much, much, more.  This goes back to the idea that dealing with one
   company that provides the total solution is easier than dealing
   with several.

Collectively, these factors should make Altos software and hardware
platform attractive to the market segment that wants a powerful, high
performance UNIX system, but has no time or resource to do their own
system integration and debugging.  The PC-like open architecture
is just an added bonus (remember, Altos has previously been building
proprietary multi-user systems.  These EISA systems mark the first
time Altos has gone with an industry-standard architecture).

I guess the bottom line is, if you feel that your XYZ PC and SCO
or Interactive UNIX works fine for your application, great.  Both
SCO and Interactive have done a commendable job of putting UNIX on
the PC-class platform, and are quality products.  Altos offers
enhancements that may or may not be useful to you.  For installations
that requires the additional performance, reliability, and expandability
added by Altos, we offer the solution.

-Ti
-- 
Ti Kan                                                                  \\\
vorsprung durch technik!                                                 \\\
Internet: ti at altos.com                                                /// \\\
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