[rescue] Odd SBUS cards - anyone want?

[Kevin Fitzgerrell]

On Tue, 4 Apr 2006, Joshua Boyd wrote:

>> An Ultra 2 is neither the slowest Sun I use at home, nor the slowest
>> Sun I have in production a work (a very busy semiconductor design
>> firm).
>
> So what is the slowest Sun you use at home and the slowest in
> production at work?  SS5s?

The question was asked of someone else, but this thread has been good
reading so I'll chime in here too.

I look after three large industrial process control systems at a Pulp &
Paper plant.  We use Sun workstations for operator workstations and
application servers in the control system.  We upgraded our application
servers from SparcClassics to Ultra60s a few years ago, they were starting
to get a little overloaded -- now they can do double duty as workstations
too.  Most of the operator workstations are SparcStation 4 or SparcStation
5, with a few Ultra 5s.  These all run Solaris 2.5.1.  We have a few
Blade150s running Solaris 8.  The vendor would really like all their
customers to upgrade to Windows workstations, but what we've got is
versatile, easy to administer, and more than adequate for the task at hand
(also has a lot more functionality than the Windows offering).

I just bought a couple pallets of U60s to use as spares.  Not because the
SS4 or SS5 workstations aren't capable to do the job, but I've been seeing
increasing component failure and asynchronous memory faults, and it's
cheaper to buy a 3 year old loaded U60 then it is to replace the RAM in a
SS5.  The workstations run 24/7 and I take them down once every year or two
for a single user level backup.

This hardware is pretty typical in process control systems -- because the
demands on the computer hardware don't change much, there's no reason to
upgrade until maintenance issues start to arise.

Regards,

Kevin FitzGerrell
Tokoroa, New Zealand