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Message Posted: Thu, 13 Sep 2001 @ 17:55:55 GMT

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--- Charles Zhang wrote:

Hi-

Well, I have my own opinions, but I will say that my NCR contacts have told me that the Windows product is consistently faster on performance (not sure I buy this). But I will go on at some length as to the pertinent issues with NCR and it's Unix offerings.

Let me preface here by saying "No other company on Earth makes a better data warehouse product than NCR, no question, no doubt."

That said, I'm a huge supporter of NCR, obviously, but I do have my issues with their position on unix.

People on this list have seen me at this before, and I apolagize for being repetitive. NCR's plan is to drop it's MP-RAS unix product and move the teradata product over to another unix OS (rumor has it that this will be HP-UX on IA-64 arch.). As an SA, I have to deal with this fairly directly, most everything I have that says NCR on it runs MP-RAS (with some Win boxen as well). I have to say that our Teradata boxes are incredibly stable, the most I see with issues on them is the occasional hardware failure, but nothing is perfect, thankfully, it's NCR, so most everything is redundant. The uptimes of the boxes (if you judge that to be a good measure) is 300+ days on average. I would highly suggest keeping your uptimes more around the 100 day mark and updating patches as much as you can. This is just common sense in systems admin.

Now, I really like MP-RAS, I have to say it is one of the cleanest, most usable OSes I have ever used, the issues with it are pretty basic: not much for apps., what is out there is rarely updated (given that you are looking at database systems, I don't think you'll be running app. servers off you nodes, but I could be wrong). In all, MP-RAS is great, but I'm not sure what the timeline and changeover strategy is for the unix side of the world, Windows will always be Windows, but from my experience with Win clusters, I'm not over-eager to put together a global, highly available, much used datawarehouse on anything Windows without an identical system as a backup to the first.

NCR can do a lot with it's Teradata software to make it fault tolerant and redundant, but Windows only goes so far in these areas. NCR focuses on Reliability, Availability, and Servicability (hope I go that right), I really haven't experienced that with Windows as of yet, but maybe I just haven't installed the right Windows version yet (I've done everything that's out right now).

In all, I like the unix based warehouses better, I think of them as much more stable and consistent in performance and availability, but I am somewhat biased. The Windows product is coming along, but until you have a Windows OS that actually comes with a real scripting language and a reason to have an 'uptime' command, I'll leave that for development.

I apolagixe to the list for being repetitive and somewhat of a zealot here, and I apolagize to Charles for not truly providing an answer, basically, it comes down to, MP-RAS is great, but on the way out at some point, Windows is questionable, IMHO, as a warehouse platform, and I'm not sure where the unix future lies for NCR. I'd discuss this with your NCR pre-sales people and really get into the upgrade routes on the unix boxen, but I am sorry to say that I have no more than that for you.

Thanks for your time,

loadc

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