[rescue] Enterprise 3000/3500 and StorEdge A5000 rescue

[Jonathan Patschke]

On Wed, 22 Sep 2010, Dan Sikorski wrote:

> I am being urged to take two Enterprise 3000's, an Enterprise 3500 and two 
> StoreEdge A5000's home with me today.  I don't know what configuration they 
> are in, but they are in the next room right now and i can take a look at 
> them.

E3500 systems are interesting and just as fast as they ever were.  Any
reasonably modern multiprocessor amd64 box will outrun it in both
computation and I/O, and the difference in power consumption will make up
the acquisition cost of the amd64 system in mere months.  So, if you want
it as a computer and you have no qualms about running amd64, it's a bad
investment at any price (even free).

However, if you want a nicely-sized (not E6500 gigantic, not Ultra 5 puny)
example of a Sun system from the (IMO) peak of Sun's golden days, I can
think of no better computer.  It'll run Solaris 10 acceptably and Solaris
9 very, very well.  I have no plans to part with my E3000, despite having
not booted it in several months.

You'll be limited to whatever FC disks you can scrounge unless you want to
abuse the tape bay and stuff a cool-running SCSI disk in there.  That's
where the A5000 comes in, although you might want to leave it behind and
look for an external JBOD and an sbus LVD SCSI controller.  A5000s weren't
all that fast, and IIRC they were limited to 18GB disks.  Plus you had to
use that abominable RAID manager tool to do anything with them.

Taking the whole lot would probably be madness, though.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke | "There is more to life than increasing its speed."
Elgin, TX         |                                   --Mahatma Gandhi
USA               |