On 6/30/06, Scott Quinn <compoobah at valleyimplants.com> wrote:
I wouldn't get more than one, but one could be a
good addition to your museum.
Sun4d was Sun's first large-scale SMP architecture...
Oftentimes the SPARCservers were paired with a SPARCstorage array which used a
nonstandard (prestandard) fiber link up and mix of hardware and software
control/striping.
This combined with the fact that they are very picky about cooling (30 drives fit in one
chassis) was why I didn't get one when I had the chance.
Ours had three of those arrays. One problem as far as I'm concerned
is that they topped out at 4GB drives (internal firmware issues, I'm
told). Back in the day, when 30 x 2GB drives was a lot of storage,
they were fine boxes, but today, when one spindle can hold that much
and more, the old Storage Arrays just don't seem worth it for
production use, even at home. They'd be more interesting for a
technology demonstration than holding real data. Also, the RAID5 was
really slow on those boxes, so we always ran ours with RAID 0+1,
halving the available capacity.
The 3000s and 5000s I bought later used "real" Fiber Channel arrays
with Seagate native fiberchannel drives (ST9xxxx-FCs or something like
that). Not as common as SCA drives, but at least they were standard.
-ethan