duncan@comp.vuw.ac.nz (Duncan McEwan) (04/15/88)
Our department will shortly be buying a small number of (20 or so) diskless workstations for staff and graduate student use. The options currently appear to be a mixture of Sun 3/50's and 3/60's, or HP 9000 series 300 model 318's (I think similar in max config to a Sun 3/50 except you *can't* put a local disk on it - they are about 20% cheaper than the 3/50, possibly because of this fact). An alternative might be IBM PS/2's running AIX but we are not sure if they can function in an NFS based diskless environment. The two problems are deciding on the appropriate file servers, and figuring out which workstation(s) to buy. The local Sun agents have suggested that for 20 or so workstations we might be looking at two Sun 3/180's to handle the load. HP's suggestion was similar but based on HP 9000 model 350's. But with these file server machines costing approx $NZ70,000 (approx $US45,000) each we would like to look at other alternatives. One alternative might be a single Sun-4, although I am not sure how much that will cost. Another option is that as part of the same equipment proposal we hope to upgrade our current pyramid 90x (8Mb main memory - no data cache) to a pyramid 9805 or 9810 with probably 16Mb memory). The pyramid's main task would be to support 30-50 undergraduate and graduate student's (not simultaneously). Would it also be able to support the load of acting as a file server for the above number of diskless workstations doing typical (whatever that is) work? If it cannot support the load by itself, what about an upgraded pyramid in conjunction with a single Sun or HP file server? Regarding the choice of workstation. I believe it is possible for Sun workstations to boot over NFS now, rather than using the old "nd" protocol. Would this be possible with a Pyramid acting as a file server, or would we need at least one Sun file server? Can the HP workstations running HP/UX also boot over NFS? Would they be able to boot from a non-HP file server? How well could we expect a mixed environment of diskless Sun's and HP's (and possibly PS/2's) to work? I think that is enough questions for one article. Any help would be appreciated, especially from people who actually have had experience with any of the above combinations. Email reponses - if there is enough demand, I will summarise. Duncan Domain: duncan@comp.vuw.ac.nz Path: ...!uunet!vuwcomp!duncan
rroot@edm.UUCP (uucp) (04/20/88)
From article <13504@comp.vuw.ac.nz>, by duncan@comp.vuw.ac.nz (Duncan McEwan): > Regarding the choice of workstation. I believe it is possible for Sun > workstations to boot over NFS now, rather than using the old "nd" protocol. > Would this be possible with a Pyramid acting as a file server, or would > we need at least one Sun file server? If nothing else you could look at putting one real cheap disk on one of the suns, and then have all the machines look to the Pyramid for the rest of their file server work.. (needless to say, I've never done this) -- ------------- Stephen Samuel {ihnp4,ubc-vision,vax135}!alberta!edm!steve or userzxcv@uqv-mts.bitnet
ron@topaz.rutgers.edu (Ron Natalie) (04/25/88)
I see no reason why you will not be able to use the SUN4 as a server, but I'm not sure it will get you anything. I'm not sure the I/O bandwidth on a Sun 4 is going to be sufficiently better. BRL runs their SUN network with next to no SUN servers on it. Using some Gould PN systems with Chris Torek's ND code for the root/swap and the Gould provided NFS for everything else works well. Of course, the code had to be throttled back as the Gould Ethernet interfaces will outdrive the poor Suns. -Ron