[rescue] Mainframe on eBay

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Sat, 17 Sep 2005 @ 09:09 +0100, Mike Meredith said:

> I don't know about E10k's, but I've got F6900's at work that go through
> parts fairly rapidly - power supplies, CPU boards, system controllers.
> It would be nice if Sun did somewhat better. However it isn't quite as
> bad as it seems as I haven't had any downtime because of these failures.

It's still pretty doggone spooky.

If it were me, I'd be very tempted to look elsewhere, even if it meant
using something I liked less like AIX.

It's just spooky when parts on expensive machines fail on a regular
basis.

Somewhat aside:

Have any of you ever seen a computer room where several of the same
model of Sun (or other brand) machines have (excessively) different
reliability?

For example, at a previous job we had several E series machines,
same exact model and inventory.  They all ran the same software, and
their configuration was literally mirrored, and the load on them was
round-robin except that the first three machines got the heaviest jobs
in the first part of the nightly batch runs.

The first three of them were rock solid and never gave a problem at
all despite the higher loads.  The others (three or four I think) were
failing almost weekly.  We even saw hard crashes on at least one of
them.  Sun techs constantly replaced parts, but they never worked very
well compared to the first three.

For most equipment, I would say this was caused by poor quality control
rather than design issues, but shouldn't Sun have pretty good quality
control and assurance?


-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["And in billows of might swell the Saxons
before her,-- Unite, oh unite!	Or the billows burst o'er her!" -- Downfall
of the Gael]