[rescue] Picked up my E4500 today

[Mark Brown]

Matthew Weigel wrote:
> 'Fun' drive - Austin<->Houston<->Austin in 6 hours.  The gas bill sure 
> beats the ~$250 shipping option, though! :-)
>
> The E4500 can hold 8 modules total, including the one required I/O 
> board, and this one came with 7 CPU boards, 1 I/O board, and 1 disk 
> board (not installed).  The seller indicated that there had been heat 
> problems with the disk module, and suggested I not use it (in favor of 
> external storage).
>
> But I noticed the drives are both 10,000 RPM, and I'm wondering 
> whether I would see a noticeable reduction in heat from 7200 RPM 
> drives (I have some here, getting them isn't a problem).  Any opinions?
Good snag!  Road trips can be fun too!

I've never used a disk board in any E4500's that I have worked on, 
favouring external unipacks.  One caveat though, sun only "supports" a 
single unipack on the first onboard scsi controller (that is to say the 
built in scsi on the IO+ board in the primary position). IIRC this has 
to do with the internal cable length and termination and if you have 
internal cdrom/dvd and or tape.  If you require more storage use SBUS 
SCSI or SBUS FC-HBA's or even an additional IO+ board where the onboard 
scsi can be fully utilized.

Our large config E4500 grew from 2 to 3 io+ boards providing:  four HVD 
ultrascsi (sbus)(providing for four SDLT 320 drives in a STK L80), two 
2-gigabit HBA's(sbus)(EMC SAN), One GE SBUS (Private network), One 
onboard GE (main network). The rest of the free sbus slots were filled 
with SE SCSI for locally attached storage.

At the same time we expanded the CPU/Memory boards - from two to five 
(giving us 10 X 400MHz).

These were really great systems.  You can see by this ones attachment, 
this one sat in the core of our infrastructure.  This thing would do 
crazy amounts of I/O (consistently) as a core NFS, CIFS as well as 
Veritas NetBackup server. Oh yeah - in it's spare time it would compile 
our product too :-)

I suppose my main beef with this system was the poor cooling (side to 
side).  This made the system pretty hard to rack.  It eventually made it 
in a 21" cabinet style rack (without side or rear panels), on a shelf.

Have fun with your E4500!

P.S.  Ensure you work on a well padded surface (lots-o-static bubble 
wrap) if you need to work on any of those boards (CPU or IO).  And get a 
Sun torque wrench for the CPU's if you need to change one.

/M