ian@dgp.toronto.edu (Ian S. Small) (06/12/91)
We are considering "merging" two Power Irises together, one of which is already ours and one of which we are considering buying from another department of the University. Both machines are currently under "Full" maintenance contracts with SGI. While we would like to have the machine that would result from the merging of our two platforms (6 unmatched processors, refrigerator rack, 128 MB, second ethernet board, etc.), we are not prepared to pay the resulting maintenance bill (estimated at approximately $11000/annum - that's two SparcStations a year!). What we would like to do instead is maintain certain elements of the machine, and leave others to be repaired as they break. In particular, we would tend to maintain one dual processor set, and leave the other four processors on a time-and-materials basis. We are sufficiently impressed with the reliability of the SGI product to risk the possible costs inherent in time-and-materials maintenance. I will not, however, take the entire machine off maintenance as it file serves part of our environment and consequently I need to maintain at least enough of it to guarantee that we can get it repaired quickly at least to a state where it can file serve, even if we have to rip out some of the (unmaintained) processors to do so. The bad news is that it *appears* that SGI Service may not allow us to do this. To be fair, they are still checking and have yet to render a final decision on the matter. However, it did not even occur to me that this would present a problem, as we have Sun rackmounts in which various combinations of boards are on and off maintenance, and Sun seems to have no problem with this. Has anybody out there in NetLand tried to "half" maintain a Power Iris in the way that I have described? If you do maintain an Iris like this, or if you have tried, I would be very interested in finding out about your experiences. If there is interest, I will summarise for the net. Thanks in advance, ian -- Ian S. Small (416) 978-6619 Dynamic Graphics Project Computer Systems Research Institute University of Toronto ian@dgp.toronto.edu Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A4