romeo@lindy.stanford.edu (Patrick Goebel) (02/10/90)
We are on the verge of installing an ethernet local area network with a Sun SPARCserver 370 at the hub. While we had originally planned to purchase the 370 in a 32-Mbyte, 2X688-Mbyte SMD configuration, it was pointed out to us by one of our board members that we could save great gobs of money by buying a starter 370 workstation (8-Mbyte, 327-Mbyte SCSI) from Sun and then adding RAM and large capacity disks from third party vendors. Is this a mean thing to do to Sun? Or do people do it all the time? And if everyone does it, what third party vendors have been found to be reliable? Also, what do people do for service contracts? One for Sun and one for the add-on equipment, or a fourth party service contract (such as Motorola?) to cover everything. I'm new to this newsgroup and appologize if this topic has been covered recently. The world of third party equipment seems to be very large and ever-changing. My biggest fear is saving capital at the expense of costly maintenance and frequent downtime. Perhaps it would be useful to others reading this bboard if we could compile some statistics and first hand reports on a variety of third party sources of RAM and large capacity disks (among other equipment). If so, I will post a summary of any responses I receive. Thanks for any suggestions you might have. Patrick Goebel--romeo@lindy.stanford.edu Network Administrator CASBS
jet@karazm.math.uh.edu (J. Eric Townsend) (02/10/90)
>X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 9, Issue 38, message 17 >Is [buying third party ram and disks] a mean thing to do to Sun? >Or do people do it all the time? And "mean thing to do"? If Sun chooses to charge outrageous prices for their ram/drives, then they deserve to not sell any of them. If we can, we'll buy our next Sparc-1's with *no* ram whatsoever. For ~ $85/Mb, you can get Siemens (or other quality) ram from a semi-reputable Mac house. We just got a CDC/Impremis/Seagate V w/ case, power and cable from Clayton Computers for $2500. (It did take them a week to get a working internal cable to us, however, I think they just happened to get a bad lot of drive->scsi cables.) It's like buying a car -- I'll buy it at the dealer, but unless there's a marked difference in quality (ie: no name brand available), I'll get my parts whereever they're cheap. J. Eric Townsend University of Houston Dept. of Mathematics (713) 749-2120 jet@karazm.math.uh.edu Skate UNIX(tm).