[rescue] Question on V490 power

[Ron Wickersham]

On Sun, 24 Aug 2014, Jawahar Panchal wrote:

---snip---

> I may be able to acquire a V490 machine from a friend - however the specs on
> the machine show it as 208VAC single phase power supplies only. As I only have
> regular household 110vac phase-neutral circuits available, I was wondering if
> anyone has ever run a V490 with power supplies from a V480 or such (looking at
> the images of the power supplies shows what looks to be identical connectors)?
> Any other possibilities on 110VAC operation?

hi Jay,

don't know about using V480 supplies, but another option is a step-up 
transformer that takes the 110vac input and produces 220vac output (the
V490 supplies are rated to accept 200-240vac).

you'd need one rated from 2KVA to 3KVA or larger.   traditional american
"dry" transformers of this size are expensive new and cost these days
around $1000 from Granger's or other industrial suppliers and will weigh
around 50-70 pounds.  but they will run 24/7 forever with no issues.

a ligher option is an "autotransformer" that doesn't have isolated
windings, but will work fine with the Sun V490 supplies.   these are
lighter-duty from places like Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Power-Transformer-Voltage-3000W-Step/dp/B002DRG9VC/
which is listed at $75 with free shipping and says it weighs 27.5 pounds.

you can pick up the industrial ones from surplus electric stores cheap and
sometimes find them on Craig's list, but you sort of have to know what
you're doing and the industrial ones don't come with outlets or cords,
you'd have to provide connections yourself.

good luck with the unit -- sounds like a lot of fun and get some experience
with Fibre Channel drives and a pretty capable Sparc processor.   nearest
desktop workstation i think would be SunBlade 2000, but only taking
two processors and much less memory.

-ron