Date: Wed, 17 Jul 1996 15:24:32 -0500 (CDT) From: Timothy Brown <tbrown@mail1.i1.net> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Opinions? Message-ID: <Pine.BSI.3.93.960717151835.2394A-100000@mail1.i1.net> In-Reply-To: <1363.837632747@time.cdrom.com>
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> an interesting exercise. Any takers who are more familiar with the > current state of the NT market than I? Sure, Jordan, I can do that. We came into the market as an IPP. I tried for ages to convince my boss to run UNIX, but he wasn't going for it. He has carpal tunnel and was already very familiar with Windows, so it was easier to use for him in his physical condition than was UNIX (but not by much). I can't do exact costs for you as i'm not the one who writes the checks, but you can figure what we did as somewhere near baseline. We spent $12K+ on a server w/ 128MB of RAM, 8GB of hard disk, CDROM, etc. It's a PPro200mhz. We spent $1700 (are spending, it's $1700/yr) for the Microsoft Developer's Network, which gives us NT, SQL Server, and basically the whole Microsoft backoffice Suite of products. We're going to end up spending $699 for our SMTP solution I think, $299 for our Web statistics reporting program (which I have to admit is excellent), $299 or so for our DNS, and $1000 for various assorted software solutions. Things are generally much more expensive within the NT market than without. I would have loved to save my boss all this money and go with FreeBSD or something similar, but he was bent on the idea of doing all this stuff. Now that we've done it, I can't say I don't /like/ it. It took a lot of getting used to, but I can see the benefits paying off, and the costs, in the longrun, are a little less than I would have anticipated. We're doing some custom database and WWW production solutions under NT for some fairly big clients. It's a lot easier to do it than I would have expected; I jumped into this thing with no knowledge of NT and (at least for me) the learning curve wasn't very steep. The databasing stuff i'm learning and the other fun things about NT are a lot less hairy than they would have been under UNIX. Still, there are some things that UNIX does better. For example, DNS, SMTP, etc. It does them cheaper; they may be easier to manage under NT but their performance sucks if you're not on a big fat server like I am (we tried it under a 48MB server and it was horrendous). Just my thoughts. Tim -- Tim Brown <tbrown@i1.net> Founder & Chair, ISP/C [http://www.ispc.org/]
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