AlphaServers?

[Richard Loken]

On Fri, 19 Jun 2015, Benjamin Huntsman wrote:

> Does anyone here do Alpha gear, especially the newer stuff?

I am baby sitting three ES45s, two DS20s, and a DS15 all running Tru64 Unix
5.X.  Yes, you can buy a used Dell desktop at any garage sale that has more
memory and CPU than a DS20 but it doesn't run Alpha VMS or Tru64 apps and
that is not very helpful if your data centre has one or more Alpha
applications that are still in use.

The DS15 is the newest of the hardware you listed and only 2 or 3 rack units
high so it relatively compact and less power hungry than most of its older
brothers.  The DS20 is bigger but still can be put in a modest amount of
space and the lights don't dim when you turn it on.  The ES45 is a large box
(but smaller than my AS4100) able to accept four 2GHz CPUs and 32Gbyte of
RAM from the days when that was impressive - it is a big pig.

In my humble opinion, Tru64 Unix is a very good operating system and the
advanced file system is very reliable with clustering capability and a
distributed lock manager - they were attempting (successfully) to provide
the high uptime/clustering features of VMS on Unix.  If Linux keeps at it
for another ten years, they might almost catch up.

My employer is supposed to be migrating the apps off of the Alphas and onto
Linux by the end of 2015 but, by their past performance in such endeavers,
some of the Alphas could be running for another five years.  They pay about
$50,000.00 a year to HP for support so it would have been worth their while
to finish this migration years ago.

I will get my pick of them as they are shut off so I might put OpenVMS one
of them, maybe I will even use it to replace my AS4100 which was the box
that the ES45 replaced some 15 years ago.

-- 
   Richard Loken VE6BSV, Unix System Administrator : "Anybody can be a father
   Athabasca University                            :  but you have to earn
   Athabasca, Alberta Canada                       :  the title of 'daddy'"
   ** richardlo at admin.athabascau.ca **             :  - Lynn Johnston