[SunRescue] SPARCserver+SSA Questions (lots :)

[Chris Petersen]

[snip!]

> All disks are Seagate Barracude except those 3 which are Quantum disks,
> this probably explains it too, I always found Quantum disks to be of
> poor quality. (I crashed 2 quantum bigfoot's in one year in my PC)

I don't know whether I would say Quantums are that bad, although I've heard
*lots* about bigfoots and other Quantum IDE drive failures.  Their SCSI
products have worked fairly well for the most part for me, although I
understand there are certain models in the SCSI lineup that are very prone
to failure (one of the LVD drives comes to mind, but I don't recall
which...)

In case you didn't know, for trivia's sake, Quantum used to OEM most of
Digital's SCSI stuff, with Seagate getting a little bit of the rest.  DEC
RZ26-L 1gb disks, made by Quantum, were the first 1" LP 1GB disk I ever 
laid eyes on, and are a thing of beauty and run remarkably well from my 
experience (over 80 of 'em in client workstations in the field at a place 
I worked at).  Seagate drives, particularly ST11200Ns, on the other hand, 
seemed to give us nothing but trouble at the time.  I'm much happier with 
Seagate now, but there was a time where Seagate was a dirty word at our 
facilities :)  Some of the Barracuda's aren't so good either, we had
particular trouble with ST15150W's going out on us for a while.

[snip!]

> > 
> > Please report back to our S.H.R (Sun Hardware Reference) maintainer.
> > This is useful info.
> > 
> 
> I'm not sure what you mean, who's the S.H.R. ?

S.H.R. refers to the Sun Hardware Reference, and the maintainer is now Greg
LeBlanc, whom you'll see post to this list frequently.  If you check out the
main Sunhelp page, there'll be a link to the site that is the focus of the
currently ongoing update of the SHR (forgot the link at the moment). 
There's also an associated mailing list.

[snip!]

>  
> > > I've never played around with FC, but
> > > it certainly looks good, I gathered there's even an ANSI standard for
> > > it (and there aren't that many ANSI compliant standards for hardware
> > > communication protocols) so I'm gonna look a little closer at this,
> > > I find it quite remarkable that Sun already had this kind of technolage
> > > in the early nineties actually.
> > 
> > Sun has been running this for quite some years now, but I think there
> > was a marketing step to further improve the interface and possibly make
> > it more "open" to other vendors. Earlier everyone relied on SCSI, which
> > was limited in certain cases.
> > There are many forums, resellers and products today, but everyone seems
> > to have forgotten that Sun was one of the pioneers of FC earlier.

It's worthwhile to note that from my understanding, the FC interface on the
SSAs are not exactly compliant to the standard (I've been told they'll only
work with the Sun SBus card that's in your SS1000).  The negative side of
being the early pioneers, I suppose...

> > 
> > As for now, we've invested in a Compaq (Digital) RAIDarray 8000 with
> > FC-AL interface, hubs and some servers. Cool to the the massive
> > throughput of this baby. Just formatting a RAID-set keeps the controller
> > busy with 45MB/s throughput. :-)
> 
> Wanna trade ? 
> 
> :)
> 
> I always loved Digital (still got a little cluster of 4 digital PC boxes
> running, in fact this email is going through one of them, the mail server)

Heh, I doubt he'll want to trade (those RA8000's are nice), but I'd be glad
to trade my Alpha 250 4/266 :)  I'd love to get my hands on a SS1000 or
2000-class box someday, just for the fun of it.  I'll just have to wait till
those prices come down just a hair more, or I find a deal like you got :)

Chris

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