pwolfe@kailand.KAI.COM (01/19/89)
> > The hardware is the most reliable I've ever seen. > > That's what we were told to expect, but I have yet to see it. Since we > installed our S81 three months ago, we've had to replace one memory board > and two processor boards. After touring Sequent's manufacturing, I would find it hard to believe that a machine with that many problems made it out the door. I would definately search for outside problems, beginning with power. See if you can rent a power line monitor (maybe Sequent can loan you one - call your sales rep). In our old building we didn't have a power conditioner or UPS, just nasty old Illinois Power raw electricity, and while another vendors machine crashed on an average of once each week and our vax lost disk blocks regularly, the Balance never stayed down. In our current building, we have got a power conditioner, and our uptime is equal to the amount of time electricity is provided to our building (as close to 100% as you can get without a UPS). And because it's generator has a large flywheel, we don't go down anymore when those 1/2 second flickers hit us...nice. We've had zero hardware failures on our Symmetry S81 since we've had it (10 months), just a few minor ones on our Balance B8 in the more than three years we've had that (none in the last 9 months), and only the last one gave us any serious trouble. In our new office building, our ethernet network is MUCH larger (and apparently noiser) than the old one, and the Balance 8000 started disappearing from the network every few minutes. Sequent Service sent us a current revision SCED (SCSI/diagnostic/ethernet) board overnight (we had a really *early* Balance), and I replaced it the next day (The two day system administrator/maintenance course is really worth the trip). We've since upgraded the Balance 8000 to a B8. Sure it's not as fast as the Symmetry, but that only means all the cpu hungry software developers leave it alone for the rest of us. Their hotline and email bug report service is also very good. Patrick Wolfe (pat@kai.com, kailand!pat)