mlandau@diamond.bbn.com (Matt Landau) (01/24/89)
Anyout out there have any experience with the Interphase V/SMD 4400 (aka Phoenix) disk controller yet? This is the 9U form-factor board that Interphase claims will boot SunOS 3 *or* SunOS 4 on Sun-3's and Sun-4's. Can anyone in sun-spots land verify that they've acutally done this, particularly with the Hitachi DK815-10's that Sun is shipping as their gigabyte drives? The real plan is to outfit some 3/260 servers with multiple disks; probably one Hitachi and one old Eagle per machine, to start with. Advice and warnings will be read with interest :-) I'd also be interested in opinions on Interphase's tech support and customer service organization, and on any performance measurements comparing the Interphase Phoenix with the Ciprico Rimfire 3220's in real day-to-day use. If you reply to me by mail, I'll collect responses and summarize if I learn anything interesting. Matt Landau mlandau@bbn.com
leres@helios.ee.lbl.gov (Craig Leres) (02/08/89)
The Interphase 4400 Phoenix is really a 9U board layout of the 4200 Cheetah controller. As far as I know, the only difference between the rom sets for 4200 and 4400 is a product code that identifies which is which. We've had 4200's for a few years now and recently bought a 4400. At that time, I heard rumours that Interphase had Xylogics boot emulation working. Since my Interphase systems were either loading vmunix off of the net or some supported disk, I was pretty interested in this. I checked around and ended up with some new roms for all my 4X00 controllers (I don't think the new roms were "supported" when I got them). Basically, they emulate enough of the Xylogics 451 command set to load the various bootstraps and then vmunix. (In fact, you even "installboot" bootxy onto the Interphase drive.) I don't think the code is smart enough to do DMA, just programmed i/o. Using the new roms, we can hardware booting 3/100, 3/200, and 4/200's. The sparc is running 4.0 using the Interphase supplied driver. Note that it's pretty hard (read impossible) to get a machine up that doesn't also have some supported disk drive. But the controller is much faster than the wimpy options Sun gives you so we think it's worth the hassle; our Fujitsu 2344's run within 10% of their rated 2 Mbyte/sec transfer rate. That's on a 3/100; a colleague running Hitchi gigabyte drives through a Xylogics 7053 on a 4/200 only gets 1.2 Mbytes/sec... The roms I'm using are revision 040, 9/19/1980, product variation 36 (which indicates Xylogics boot emulation). Craig P.S. If anyone has experience with running Fujitsu Eagles on a 4200, please get in touch with me.