> E10K : requires as I remember it from 10 years ago > > 3 x 32 amps 220 volts > > For the money the Electrical power + the Cooling cost will amount to in > a while. > You can buy almost anything else . > > Also you need 4 by 4 meters in floor space and a pprreettyy wide > door > to get it inside you building. The unit is like 3 racks wide. > > And today there is a 2 rack unit server , the T5220 that does the same > job > as the E10k did for about 1/40 of the cost.
I put the first E10K into a major financial and news information provider datacenter in London many years back. From a sysadmin perspective, it was an interesting challenge. The bedding-in process was exhaustive, running bringup on domains at a high level for days to thoroughly test the hardware (some initially inexplicable problems were highlighted, and finally put down to bad CPU's), which was all very beneficial. I do like a system which gives you _ultimate_ control over the hardware - in the case of the E10K via a utility called "redx" - "Red Cross" - use it, and you may well need them ;-) which could allow you to actually fry bits of hardware. Great fun! I know/knew more about redx than any customer should... The author was Dan... or Tran... surname escapes me :-( If you buy one, type the undocumented command "author" into redx, and you will find out. On a management side, with the E10K there is a SSP - Service Support Processor, which for us was a U5 running a specialized version of Solaris 8, which through a private LAN can control the E10K hardware directly. You could play tunes by bringing up and down the speed of the fans :-) It was a great system (CRAY origin); but now its a dinosaur; and an expensive/unecologically-friendly one as everyone says. Buy a T2000, sort your storage carefully, install Solaris, and never look back... Regards... Sean. _______________________________________________ opensolaris-help mailing list opensolaris-help@opensolaris.org
