( ESNUG 360 Item 4 ) --------------------------------------------- [11/02/00]

From: Jon Stahl <jstahl@avici.com>
Subject: We're In Purgatory with Sun Workstations For EDA; What About HP?

Hi John,

I was wondering if I could poll the ESNUG community for *recent* experiences
regarding the use of HP workstations instead of Sun as a platform for EDA.

The reason I bring this up is that we have had a ridiculous amount of
trouble with our Sun hardware and software over the last few years, and we
are at the point of researching alternatives.

Now, before I get a bunch of responses along the vein of "these people must
not know what they are doing because we have used Sun for X+ years and have
never had a problem"; I ask the reader to postulate the following things:

  1) We also have X+ years of Sun hw/sw experience and started out as Sun
     bigots a few years ago.

  2) Without going into details, we have had an unreasonable amount of
     trouble with our current Sun hw/sw (hardware being big E6000 and E6500
     servers.)

  3) We have explored all reasonable avenues of resolving our problems with
     Sun, paying top dollar for the highest level of support, and even
     replacing all of our hardware in spite of the fact that diagnostics
     did not show errors.

Our top concerns are that we may switch and find ourselves with the same set
of problems with HP workstations -- that our EDA software may not be as
stable, or supported as well, or even exist on the HP platform.

(Yes, we've seen the recent news of the Sun memory failure "cover-up".  Some
of our problems may have this root cause, but most do not.)

Thanks for any feedback.

    - Jon Stahl
      Avici Systems, Inc.                        N. Billerica, MA