Re(2): [SunRescue] WinNT on Alpha

[Chris Petersen]

> 
> rescue at sunhelp.org writes:
> >The truth is it's a shame, the Alpha is a rocking cool machine, other than
> >just serving up files and printer services and the other jobs NT is
> >supposed
> >to do, there is little software for the Alpha, I looked, thought it would
> >be
> >nice to outfit a bunch of machines in our office with NT on AlphaStaion
> >200's since the staff is used to M$ products, but, no office productivity
> >software was to be found. Pity, these machines are very nice, just trapped
> >in the wasteland of big puter companies and their greed.
> >
> >Of course I haven't mentioned the UNIX OS's, but there still are no office
> >like productivity packages out there for these nice boxen.
> >
> >Putting on my asbestos undies, I am sure there be fire out there after
> >that
> >message.
> >
> >Mike N
> 
> Corning Inc. was pretty heavy into Alpha boxes for design and CAD/CAM work
> before there was a corporate shift to NT.  I've got a friend in the
> tooling shop there that has managed to keep his whole shop on
> Alpha/DigitalUnix in spite of considerable pressure from up the ladder. 
> It's strange, his shop never seems to go down, but the rest of the network
> around him is always having problems....
> 
> Tim

My former employer was MTD Products Inc. (who, among other things, builds
Yard Machines, Yard-Man, White, and Cub Cadet outdoor power equipment as
well as private labels for many other operations...).  We were a fairly
sizable Alpha workstation site using first DEC 3000 series and then later
AlphaStations and Personal Workstation 600aus for engineering CAD/CAM/CAE
work, as well as several Alpha servers for PDM & NFS file serving.

Probably somewhere around 90-100+ seats plus 6-10 servers, in fact they 
had just recently purchased around 30-40 new 600aus and were looking at 
XP1000s to replace the last of the initial DEC 3000s.  

However, my current employer, the engineering software firm whose CAD/CAM
system we used at MTD (that system being Unigraphics), decided somewhere
around the middle of last year to phase out Alpha support altogether, at
first with dropping AlphaNT at version 16 and Tru64 at version 17.  After
some complaints, they agreed to support AlphaNT & Tru64 until version 17 (2
versions out, basically, from the current release version 15).  They had
previously discontinued OpenVMS support with version 14.  Kind of sad, UG
had in the past been a large DEC ISV, with a decently heavy installed base
of VAXstations and DECstations in the earlier years.  But for most of the
last decade we've been a very large HP-UX platform ISV (in fact, according
to HP Unigraphics is the largest HP-UX ISV...), and I think that DEC (now
CPQ) relationship has withered.

Needless to say, MTD is now rapidly swapping out Alphas for NTs (Compaq
still getting the money, though, CPQ AP500s and AP550s, a very nice NT
workstation, for NT...).  Hence my earlier announcement this week regarding
the possibility of having several Alphas available in the near future.  I'm
on the inside track to try and get these machines as they come out of
service, although the majority of the newer hardware (the PWS 600aus) will
be going into use as various servers (a testament to Tru64 UNIX and Unix in
general, given the fact that MTD is a heavy NT & AS/400 shop when it comes
to servers).

What I'll probably have will come in waves:

DEC 3000/300s
DEC 3000/600s
AlphaStation 600 5/266s

When the PWS 600aus come out of service, I may be able to help make purchase
arrangements for anybody interested, but there will be a very limited number
of these (apparently, a large chunk of the 30-40 are spoken for by a
college).  Please contact me via private email and I'll add you to my list. 

I have no idea of costs yet, save that the PWS 600aus will fall some where
in line with what you'd expect to pay for an Ultra 2 or Ultra 30 potentially
(they're basically year-old machines, tops).  Prices will largely depend on
what I can get them for, as I will have to buy them, no rescuing here.  

Chris

-- 
Chris Petersen
Systems Engineer
Unigraphics Solutions Inc.		Industry Services, Mid-America Region
Email: havoc at apk.net (Personal)       petersen at ugsolutions.com (Professional)