Rack me!

[tyggerjai]

So. Anyone have a spare 1 or 2 RU case lying around?
Preferably with PSU?
2RU is probably better - costs more to throw in the colo, but not much, and means I can get a decent CPU & fan in.

Will Pay Cash, and bunnikins can't complain, because it gets hardware out of the house!

sol.
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Comments

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

Have you considered one of these little varmints? Not outrageously expensive, and if ltempt ever gets his E3k sorted I suppose he might even be inclined to be selling his...

(Having a serial console makes them worth every penny, IMO.)

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

That'd be nifty if I could actually get the link to show anything :)
It's really slow here, for some reason. Got a picture?

sol.
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[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

Erm. It's just a Sun V100. $1500 for a basic config (550MHz CPU, 256MB RAM, one 40GB disk). Small, includes a racking kit, and they work pretty nicely for this sort of job.

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

I'm not overwhelmed by Sun kit, unlike some I could mention :)

I have enough functional kit around to put together a machine that fits my needs, even if it's just re-moutning the existing kittling in a 1 RU case. The V100 is serious overkill - there's no way I'd get the traffic to justify it.

sol.
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[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

First time I've heard a V100 described as "overkill". :)

(Now, Andre's E3k plans...)

As it'll be at your workplace I suppose it's not too big a deal, but if it were a more general colo arrangement the "not a bodge" factor would make it worthwhile.

The main thing going for Sun kit in this sort of job is the serial console. Makes life *so* much easier, provided your colo facility can give you secured remote access to it. Can be a big issue if getting to the colo costs more than the machine did...

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

Well, the machine I was going to use, when electricity was an issue, was a 133 Mhz Cyrix with 128 Meg ram and 5 gig (laptop) hard drive.

Which would probably be just about adequate, though a touch cramped.
So anything more is a bonus :) The current kittling, which I might just recase when I replace it with the EPIA, is a PII 333 with 384 Meg, and that will do a more than adequate job.

Heck, I might even lash out and buy a decent mobo/CPU/RAM upgrade kit for home, which means I can use the Celeran 850 with 512 Meg for the colo box, and that will be sheer luxury.

sol.
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[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

Ah, fair enough then.

I guess I've gotten used to our ridiculously over-specced TINHO boxes: dual-P4s of some description, a couple of gigs of RAM, hardware-mirrored SCSI disk...

And idle most of the time!

[longi.livejournal.com]

You could screw those two little silver boxes to a 1RU faceplate. They are about the right size.

Seen my new SGI toy? Sun is obsolete :)

[ltempt.livejournal.com]

No way I'd part with mine - it works far too well, and the LOM makes it a particularly solid investment.

Given the choice between an average spend of $400 on a mediocre rack mount PC case and $1500 on a V100, it is a pretty easy choice. You still get 24hr replacement even without a service contract, the LOM is magical and it all fits in a neat 1RU without having the heat-death that one would expect from a 1RU PC.

If one must have a PC, I hear that DL360s aren't too bad for 1RU.

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

I was tempted to suggest the V20z, but those are pretty darned pricey and overkill (even by my standards) for this sort of job.

(I had figured they must have a single-CPU Opteron box -- a sort of x86-64 equivalent to the V100 -- but apparently not.)

I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on a V20z. I'm curious to see how well they work, though I can't see us bothering any time soon: we can get V240s for a similar price so there's not much point.

[ltempt.livejournal.com]

V240 for the same price? Wow, that's pretty good pricing on the V240. I could do with a couple of those.

V120 might be ideal for Jai's job if he didn't like the V100 - stronger disc subsystem. Actually, an old 280 might be a good shot as well.

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

We get extremely good pricing on some particular configurations via special education packages.

One of the things Jai specced was 1RU. A 280R is *way* over the top, not to mention too big.

For a cheap colo box it's hard to go past the V100. I wouldn't use one for mission-critical work stuff where we've got the money to buy fancier kit, but for personal stuff it'd certainly be a contender.

('course, I'm not buying any new computers for quite a while now.)

[ltempt.livejournal.com]

Oh, absolutely. And even in a V100 one can add another disc and have disc mirroring which eliminates the biggest failure point.

Yes, a 280 would be overkill. They *are* nice machines though and they give you FCAL disc, which is quite a performance boost.

Does your educational discount extend to staff purchases? *glint*

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

Does your educational discount extend to staff purchases?

Haven't ever asked, but I doubt it.

And bear in mind we're still probably talking something like $5-7k for a basic V240, which is a fair bit for a personal toy.

(The same money will buy you a dual G5, which is, to be honest, a more appealing toy. IMO, anyway.)

[ltempt.livejournal.com]

I guess the G5 would make a good toy if you liked IDE disc, less memory bandwidth and MacOS X. I think the main problem with trying to use a V240 as a desktop machine would be the additional cost of a decent framebuffer.

Why aren't Apple doing POWER4 machines, anyway?

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

The G5 would make a very nice desktop, the V240 is a pretty nice small server. If you need a small server, buy the V240, if you need a nice desktop, buy the G5. Given a vaguely-reasonable IDE implementation it doesn't make a whole lot of difference on a desktop.

(The V240 is almost certainly a lot noisier than the G5, and isn't going to support random hardware like firewire enclosures and USB cameras quite as easily. If you really wanted an UltraSPARC desktop it'd be a poor choice.)

I can only guess at why Apple aren't making a POWER4 system. It may be because there's some difference in the instruction sets between POWER4 and PPC. That would certainly explain it if it were so.

[ltempt.livejournal.com]

I suppose. I think a 280 would make a much nicer desktop machine, and certainly more affordable than Sun's highest end workstation option - the 880z.

The SB2000/SB2500 aren't too bad, but the expansion isn't that amazing - about on par with the average desktop of any architecture.

As for noise, if one wants quiet there are fanless designs. I'll take a big beefy UltraSPARC desktop over a quiet one any day.

The POWER4 architecture is pretty kick-arse - hopefully it'll be available on platforms other than RS/6000 soon.