My reflection on e4500 ownership. Back in 2004, I won an eBay auction from anysystems.com for a Sun E4500 for $1300.00. Eight processors. Eight Gb of ram. No drives, or any place to put one, but I had a Sun D1000 JBOD loaded up with drives, and that worked great. It also allowed me an easy way to experiment with different ZFS raid configurations, back when ZFS was new in the world. Anyway, the one thing it didn't have was a 24 bit frame buffer, and, at least at that time, a 24 bit frame buffer for the E4500 would have cost me more than I paid for the e4500. But that was OK. From there, I got my start working with SunRay thin clients. An awesome technology that I still use to this day. So anyway, when I got it, I ran it in my home 24x7 probably for the first year. It wasn't the power consumption that got me as much as the noise and heat. I am located in north Texas. I know that that is no where as bad as south Texas (it snows up here :) ), but it still gets pretty warm and with the heat coming off the e4500, the AC had problems keeping up in that part of the house. Anyway, after the first year/summer, the 24x7 thing went away and I only powered it on when I was at home. This is one of those "master of the obvious" comments, but I am going to make it anyway. The e4500 moves a lot of air to keep cool and mine was no exception. It really belongs in a data center. No matter how clean you keep your house, dust will find its way to the insides of your e4500. I ended up putting my e4500 on a cart, and disassembling the major components outside once or twice a year and cleaning them with air dogs or cats. Just a couple fish in an aquarium. If you think you live a neat and clean life, the E4500 will prove otherwise. All that aside, I owned the E4500 for several years before passing it off to someone who would love it more. I had a great time with it, hardware issues or anything like that. A great, solid box that the Sun of old was well know for. On the other hand, memories of living with the E4500 at home do temper me and allow me to hold back every time an E10K pops up in the wild. I hope this provides some value to you as someone who has already walked down that path. Jerry On 05/30/13 12:35 PM, geneb wrote:

Careful what you wish for. I have played with those over the years at home and they draw about 6 amps doing nothing and more when they are. The wheel on the power meter goes into warp drive when you turn one of those on. I can't imagine leaving one on 24/7 if I was paying the power bill.

On 5/30/2013 12:25 PM, Dave McGuire wrote: I happily admit to being a cheap bastard when it comes to electricity. My electricity bill is always reducing my beer consumption and that always makes me have a sad.

--- On Thu, 5/30/13, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote: This critter: http://i.imgur.com/Qp0TE4Y.jpg Raised my electric bill by over $200 a month. It draws nearly 15A continuous in that configuration. I ran it for quite a while, but eventually had to relegate it to occasional backup service, powering it on only when I needed it. -Ian

On 05/30/2013 06:05 PM, Mr Ian Primus wrote: That is quite a BEAST. E4500 with three A5000s!! Yow! -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA

On May 30, 2013, at 8:34 PM, Steven Hirsch <snhirsch at gmail.com> wrote: Because, E4500 and A5200s!!! Those disk arrays are what's killer, though.

On Thu, 31 May 2013, Mr Ian Primus wrote: I appreciate that, too! It's one of the reasons I've been working on a late-'50s phonograph. -- Cory Smelosky http://gewt.net/ Personal stuff http://gimme-sympathy.org Experiments

On Thu, 31 May 2013, Steven Hirsch wrote: Running Alpine, obviously. -- Cory Smelosky http://gewt.net/ Personal stuff http://gimme-sympathy.org Experiments

On Thu, 31 May 2013, Dave McGuire wrote: Why'd you replace the V480? Needed some of the newer processor features and more capacity? -- Cory Smelosky http://gewt.net/ Personal stuff http://gimme-sympathy.org Experiments

On Thu, 31 May 2013, Dave McGuire wrote: If they were a bit lighter, I know someone that would LOVE a V480. He could definitely benefit from the reliability. Ah, I bet they will! -- Cory Smelosky http://gewt.net/ Personal stuff http://gimme-sympathy.org Experiments

On May 30, 2013, at 9:09 PM, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote: Do you have them clustered in an HA configuration?

On Thu, 31 May 2013, Dave McGuire wrote: *Cough* Intel Windows Servers *cough* -- Cory Smelosky http://gewt.net/ Personal stuff http://gimme-sympathy.org Experiments

On May 30, 2013, at 9:55 PM, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote: Now you're giving me flashbacks to Sun Cluster 2.x ?. shared disks, quorum devices, having to change the SCSI ID of the HBA on one of the systems if we had SCSI between them, terminal concentrators with no password so a master cluster node could Stop-A the other node and multiple-redundant-everything (private ethernet, public ethernet.)

On 30/05/13 9:09 PM, Dave McGuire wrote: A T2000 is a monster box. I'm looking for a cheap one near Toronto :) --Toby

On 2013-05-31 00:05, Mr Ian Primus wrote: Probably, because you running it with a fridge, side by side ;-)

On May 30, 2013, at 14:14, mc68010 <mc68010 at gmail.com> wrote: Is that 110 or 3 phase? Either way, 6A is more than my entire rack consumes (at 110v) when fully armed and operational, though I assume that will change when I get my new RL02 running. - Dave

On 05/30/2013 04:06 PM, David Riley wrote: E3x00s eat standard 110V. Little baby sub-deskside machines. Not by much. Once spun up, they only pull ~130W or so. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA

On 05/30/2013 06:34 PM, Jonathan Katz wrote: Just to clear up confusion...My two lines above are about very different things. The "~130W or so" is for a spun-up RL01 or RL02 drive, NOT a Sun E3x00. The latter pulls quite a bit more than that! -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA

On 05/30/2013 09:16 PM, David Riley wrote: No, there's very little similarity between the E10K and the other ExK machines. The E10K is an outgrowth of a Cray-designed machine; it followed the Cray CS6400 SuperServer, and was designed mostly by Cray. Sun got it when they acquired that division of Cray, and sold it under their name. And yes, the E10K is a BEAST. It pulls over 10kW, and has FOUR rather beastly power cables with L6-30 connectors. It is one of the two heaviest pieces of equipment in here, weighing about 1600lbs. The only machine in here that's heavier is the IBM z890. The E3K, on the other hand, I can (with minor difficulty) lift by myself, and runs on 110V power. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA

On May 30, 2013, at 9:16 PM, David Riley <fraveydank at gmail.com> wrote: I have both an E3000 and an E10K. The E10K takes up to 8 240V feeds at up to 15A. I don't think it was ever offered in a 3-phase configuration, but I'd have to revisit the Sun FEH to verify that. It can run on only four of the 8 feeds, though. I don't have enough power at my house to run it, nor the proper facilities to keep it cool. The E10K also requires at least one workstation (called an SSP) to "boot" it. Like the CS6400 and other systems, this system was used to mete out the system boards into domains, and was usually used as a JumpStart server to install the domains. You'd also handle dynamic IO operations from the SSP (eventually you'd use cfgadm within the domains as an alternate option.) The E3000 is the other end of the spectrum; it was the baby of the Enterprise line (not including the E250 and some of the Netra line.) It was the only Enterprise system with internal disks (everything else either needed a special disk board or had some kind of external storage.) It was really designed to be an all-in-one smallish DB, NFS, or Mail server. On the system and IO-board side everything from the E3000 to the E6000 series was the same; the backplanes just got bigger as did the power requirements. The x500-series offered a bump in speed of the IO backplane (I think from like 50Mhz to 83Mhz) while the E3500 was a very different beast from the E3000. The 3000 had SCSI internal, not FC-AL. The 3500 had room for one more system board, so you could shoehorn 8 CPUs (4 system boards) and one IO board in there; the E3000 as limited to 3 boards + one IO board. There are also two revs of sbus IO boards for the Enterprise series. Both have built-in fiber connectors for GBICs, but only the later rev is true FC-AL and control A5000s, or connect to SANs. The early rev was just to connect to the SSA-100s and SSA-200 disk arrays. Some of the sbus IO boards could take Creator frame buffers, too. My E3000 only has six 267Mhz CPUs. Some of the components can be shared among the systems. The E10K had RAM and processors that could be put onto the Enterprise system boards, but the actual system boards are very different among the platforms. sbus and PCI cards could obviously be used in either platform provided you have the right IO cards; I only have an sbus IO card on my E3000 while the E10K has a mixture of PCI and sbus IO. These systems all shipped with and ran Solaris 2.5.1. By the time Solaris 8 and 9 came out, Sun integrated, fixed, and back-ported features from the E10K line to the rest of the Enterprise line, so you could use tools like cfgadm to disable a misbehaving system or IO board in an E3000 or other Enterprise server and pull it out with the system running, and replace it, too! I was given some spares with my E10K, and some of the spares are broken (the post-it with "hoses entire system when used" seemed foreboding.) I'm going to take the CPUs and RAM off that board, put them on one of the E3000 system boards and see if they work in there. Oh, and you don't want to bend the pins on the centerplane. For shipping/moving (I just got my E10K last weekend) we had all the system boards removed. I've prepped them in place, but I'm too scared to lock them into the system. I'm actually going to go back through each board and ensure that it's lined up correctly.

On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 12:17 PM, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com>wrote: On 05/29/2013 09:14 PM, Andrew Hoerter wrote: Central NC. My spider sense is tingling...