km@mathcs.emory.edu (Ken Mandelberg) (05/14/89)
I notice that Sun has a promotion that packages the sale of new Sun 4/280s with an "upgrade" to the Sun 4/3xx CPU and memory. There is a warning in the description of this program that this ends up trading the 4/280s ECC memory for the 4/3xx asynch parity memory, which is less reliable and may not be suitable for critical applications. The examples given of "critical" are financial applications, or fileservice for a large number of workstations. In case someone at Sun who is familiar with this issues is listening my questions are: 1) How serious an issue is this? Is there some way to quantify it? If the "mean time between crashes" goes down 5% without ECC, it is not too bad. If it goes down 50% it is. 2) Does that parity issue effect an upgraded 4/280 any differently than it does a brand new 4/390? The 390 is advertised as being Sun's best fileserver for a large number of workstations. Though not related to the memory issue another related question to the upgrade is: 3) Other than the obvious issue of the IPI disks and new front loading tape drive, does an upgraded 4/280 suffer any other deficits relative to a 4/390? For example, does the backplane on a 4/280 preclude some additional upgrade that a 4/390 does not? Ken Mandelberg | km@mathcs.emory.edu PREFERRED Emory University | {decvax,gatech}!emory!km UUCP Dept of Math and CS | km@emory.bitnet NON-DOMAIN BITNET Atlanta, GA 30322 | Phone: (404) 727-7963