Academic workstations

[Arthur Stine]

Although workstation speed has increased dramatically over the past few years
(Sun, DEC, Apollo, etc all now have machines which run in excess of 5 mips and
the newer RISC technologies push this up to and past 15mips), the speed of the
local area networks have not (Ethernet is still widely used, with token rings
seeing some increasing use). One cannot realize the maximum potential of the
higher performance workstation by using them as a diskless workstation.

Here at Clarkson University, we have a number of Sun workstations (3/50's, 
3/60's, 386i's) which are served off of a couple of 3/260 servers. The 3/50's
are primarily diskless, but the others all have local disk. We also have
15 Vaxstations (all diskless except for 1 with local page/swap) served off
of a vaxserver-3500. There are additional Suns in other departments which
are the same sort of technology (3/50's served from a 3/260). Performance
is adaquete for the diskless workstations, but when the network becomes
heavily used, the diskless stations feel the pinch. 

Overall, the best bet is probably to use central servers for user files,
large applications, etc and equip the stations with local page/swap and
their own set of systems files (this applies to both Unix and VMS systems,
as the both will make heavy use of the network for I/O in the client/server
setup). This way, you can have the users files residing in a common place, 
accessible from a number of places, but still realize the high performance of
the workstations. Making a DECstation or Sparcstation page/swap and do all
of its I/O across an Ethernet will not make the workstation seem very fast.
And it won't take many of the faster workstations to load down the net. Note
also that the RISC systems generally have larger images than their CISC
counterparts.

Diskless only stations (in my opinion) are the wave of the past. Without
higher bandwidth networks, they have become throttled by the available
network technology.

art stine
sr network engineer
clarkson u