[SunRescue] WinNT on Alpha

[Bill Bradford]

On Thu, Feb 03, 2000 at 11:14:19AM +0100, Bjrn Ramqvist wrote:
> Probably thanks to a big market introduction, they often use Alphas in
> all sorts of cool things. One particular nice box is this one;
> http://www.netapp.com
> These are fast boxes, much because of it's intelligent software, but
> oooooh so expensive... =(

Other than Sun hardare, Network Appliance NFS "toasters" are the single
best piece of hardware I've ever had the pleasure of using.  I've used
their F210 (yellow Intel-based) and F620 (I think, its been a while - the
first "chrome" Alpha model) filers, and my god, I loved them.  Talk about
making a sysadmin's job SO much easier....

Even tho our first batch of F2xx's had a bad motherboard revision that
prevented us from using more than 64mb of RAM at first (I was the poor
schmo who got to go in at 3am, swap out the motherboards, while at the
time this was downing our mail service, as fast as I could), I loved the
boxes.  Even now, I'd gladly sacrifice body parts even for an older 
Intel-based blue or yellow box.  Those machines put up with some 
HORRENDOUS testing that we did that should never be duplicated. 8-)

"Hey, lets take the shelf from one box, and put it on the other!  and see
what happens!" - amazingly, it recovered and worked fine.

Of course, NetApp wasnt happy that I found out that their NVRAM sticks
were just a generic part from Dallas Semiconductor, so instead of paying
$2k/stick, we just paid $85 each and had them shipped from the same place
that NetApp got them from.  First time I've ever seen a salesman do the
goldfish trick. (mouth open, moth closed.. mouth open, mouth closed...) 8-)

In the same vein, their older fast/wide SCSI disk shelves were no more than
DEC Storageworks BA350 modules with different labels.. we saved tons of money
by buying used shelves and disk cannisters and then new drives, and only
buying the "toaster" itself from NetApp....

*sigh* okay, enough reminiscing.

Bill

-- 
+-----------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
|Bill Bradford          | mrbill at pdp11.org     | mrbill at mrbill.net    |
|http://www.sunhelp.org | http://www.pdp11.org | http://www.mrbill.net|
+-----------------------+----------------------+----------------------+