Letters: Sun Licenses; NAS; Lab Environment

Party Hardy
You asked, "Will anyone come to Sun's licensing party?" (BuzzCut, Oct. 2, 2003). Let me answer: I hope so.

As your article points out, costs are a major concern for IT shops. But if Sun delivers a suite that at least matches what is available from Windows and Microsoft's Office suite, sign me up.

It would please me to see Sun release stable and robust product bundles--the application suites that users need--and promote them heavily. I am tired of having products just as good as, if not better than, those from Microsoft get swept away because of Redmond's marketing and money.

The naysayers will claim that the cost savings aren't there and that it'll cost more to train users on the new systems. But the initial cost of training on Office was acceptable, wasn't it? For me, the cost will be minimal--I have been running OpenOffice next to Microsoft Word and the switchover has been no less difficult than when I first opened AmiPro or WordPerfect. So tell everyone to skip the rhetoric on cost. Let the users decide.
Claude Roloff
Systems Manager; Company name withheld by request
Syracuse, N.Y.

Into the Light

The article "Justify My Lab" (Sept. 25, 2003) helps take labs out of the dark ages. Well done!

I manage a well-funded and well-staffed "development and testing environment"--aka a lab. This is one of the most difficult positions I have ever held. As your story says, maintaining support for a lab requires continuous justification, and the lab is often the first place management considers when cuts need to be made.

But because my team takes great care to document our environment and changes, we have been able to publish our findings and establish best practices. We continually strive to improve and add services, such as code migration, infrastructure consulting, database tuning and administration. We've even been able to influence some production changes and push our service provider to follow our guidelines and best practices.
J. Buton
Development & Testing Hosting Services
Company name withheld by request; Dublin, Ohio

NAS No-Shows?
Thanks for your article on the "First-Class NAS" (August 21, 2003). You mentioned some other network-attached storage products, such as those from Network Appliance and RaidZone. Why were those products not tested?
Bronson Yi
CAD/Unix System Administrator, Intermec Technologies Corp.
[email protected]Steve Schuchart responds: Network Appliance declined our invite, saying its products are positioned at the high end of the market, which our review did not cover. As for RaidZone, though the company probably makes a fine product, it has no appreciable market share. Hundreds of companies make NAS boxes out of generic hardware, but we have to draw the line somewhere. Market share and visibility are often the delineators.

Clarification
In "NIP Attacks in the Bud" (Sept. 4, 2003), we compared NetScreen Technologies' IDP 500 to Network Associates' more expensive IntruShield 4000. However, we failed to mention that the IntruShield 4000 supports four times the maximum bandwidth that the IDP 500 supports. Both vendors offer other products that may be more appropriate for your bandwidth requirements.

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