Re: Is this list alive?

[Dave McGuire <mcguire%neurotica.com@localhost>]

On 12/18/2012 02:57 AM, Aaron J. Grier wrote:
>> I'm amazed that the 1000A is still running.  They're the only Alphas
>> I've ever found to be less reliable than the Multia.  I'm glad to hear
>> at least ONE of them was decent.
> 
> I've never met anybody else with a 1000A -- any suggestions on things to
> look out for, common failures, etc?

  I've had six 1000 and 1000A machines.  On five, the power supplies
died.  On the sixth, the CPU board went south.

> theoretically it should be possible to bridge between "classic" SCSI and
> SAS (and by superset, SATA,) but I don't know where to find such
> devices.  clues welcome.

  That would be interesting indeed.  I've done similar things with
FibreChannel.  It's amazing where the SCSI protocol shows up. :)

>> I'll bet even older SCSI drives will last a good bit longer than the
>> consumer-grade drek flooding the market now.
> 
> certainly a lot of the old drives keep going!  I have an RZ56 and RZ57
> in my DECstation that just seem to keep going.  unfortunately for these
> drives, longevity isn't the only metric I'm concerned about.

  Yeah. :-(

> pulling out my kill-a-watt, shuffling some power cords, and exercising
> redundant power supplies, I see that the external disk tray on my 1000A
> is pulling a bit over 120W while idle.  over the course of a year, that
> costs me roughly $125 to keep running at $0.12/kWh.  that certainly
> covers the cost of a gig-E card, and I have 80GB of RAIDed free space on
> another machine that I could export via iSCSI... (now could I get it all
> configured for $80 of my time investment.  hee hee.)

  I've considered putting together a honking big Solaris box (well,
another one) and setting it up as a ZFS-based NAS serving up iSCSI.  I
know lots of people who have done that with great success.  You can use
crappy drives but ZFS handles the crappiness.

>> Ugh, why [suck it up and migrate all the services to amd64]?  I parse
>> "commode" in "commodity".  [amd64] hardware is crap...
> 
> where else to go?

  UltraSPARC for big, ARM for small.

>>   My next major infrastructure upgrade will be from UltraSPARC-III+ to
>> UltraSPARC-T2.  Going 2-3 years between reboots, I'm not in too much of
>> a rush to even do that.
> 
> that's definitely how it should be, and something the computing industry
> seems to have forgotten.  flaky hardware?  virtualize it across multiple
> systems.  flaky software?  design your application for redundancy.
> 
> damn kids don't know what a lawn is anymore.  :)

  Yup. :-(  All I know is there will be at least ONE corner of the
computing world that is sane, at least until I go to the big datacenter
in the sky.

               -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA