[rescue] good sources for USIII + systems

[Patrick Finnegan]

On Tuesday 22 January 2008, Sridhar Ayengar wrote:
> I think that probably has something to do with economies of scale.
> Anyway, I just picked up a F6800 for $8000 with 48GB RAM and 24
> processors, and I consider that to be a pretty good deal.

I hope that wasn't for home.  If it was, put the machine on a UPS, and 
don't ever turn it off.

We've got 5 F6800s at work (fully loaded USIII's), and each time there's 
a power outage, and sometime when we shut them down, at least one 
processor gets marked 'bad' coming up.   That means that you need 
someone from Sun with their encryption key to give you a processor 
unlock code, which is time and date (and IIRC processor serial #) 
specific.  You can probably trick the date/time part of it, but still, 
we've had way more issues with them than, say, our p690 regattas.

At this point, we're looking to trade them in for well-populated X4600s, 
which are a bit smaller (4U instead of 42U or so ;), less power hungry, 
and faster.  For selling back to a reseller, we've gotten a quote of 
like $25k per machine (24 1.2GHz USIIIs, 192GB ram), which goes pretty 
far torwards paying for a loaded X4600.  The memory alone is the most 
valuable part though, I think $20k or so of the quote was just for the 
memory in the machine.

Pat
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