As usual, thanks for all the prompt reponses to my query regarding
upgrading possibilities for a SUN 3/280 (included in full at the
end of this message). I am particularly grateful as this topic is
technically not of the emergency nature that the sun-managers list
is intended for. In the future, I will post such queries to either
comp.sys.sun.admin or comp.sys.sun.misc. I encourage all the readers
of this list to do likewise.
Anyway, back to the question at hand. The suggestions look to be
as follows:
1. Add a Sparc VME board. Perhaps a little pricey for what you get.
2. Get a standard SUN upgrade package, say to a 4/670 or 4/690.
With University discount, we might be able to get this for
arounnd $12k. Would have to get SBUS board for terminals,
and replacement disk also. Would lose the 1/4" tape drive.
(Could possibly get a comsulting option to keep these,
although more $$.)
3. Wait for Sun to announce a "$5k machine at the end of the year
based on the Tsunami processor". By the time we bought an
SBUS board to run the terminals and another drive, it'd be
around $10k.
4. Keep the machine around as a tape server and buy a Sparc 2 or 10
with 1 Gby disk and SBUS board (or other SCSI port boxes)
to run terminals.
5. Upgrade to a SUN 4/380 or 4/200. All the devices would then still
work. Pretty inexpensive, but already almost obsolete.
Option #4 seems the best bet, assuming money is available. We really
need the tape drive, as much of our astronomy data is still on 1/4" tape
archives. As someone pointed out, things aren't quite as expensive as
they might seem above, as maintenance costs are killing us on the 3/280
now. If money is tight, perhaps we'll try option #5.
Thanks again for all the responses. Special thanks goes to:
gustavo@davinci.concordia.ca (Gustavo Vegas)
mc@moc.jpl.nasa.gov (Mike Caplinger)
gwolsk@sei.com (Guntram Wolski)
canuck@rice.edu (Michael Pearlman)
jaf@inference.com (Jose A. Fernandez)
pjw@math30.sma.usna.navy.MIL (Peter J. Welcher)
mdl@cypress.com (J. Matt Landrum)
sjh@math.purdue.edu (Steve Holmes)
era@niwot.scd.ucar.EDU (Ed Arnold)
neil%wizard.uucp@ics.uci.edu
gbs@stratus.swdc.stratus.com (George B. Smith)
jdd@cdf.toronto.edu (John DiMarco)
Patrick
*----------------------------------------------------------------------------*
| Patrick Shopbell Department of Space Physics and Astronomy |
| pls@pegasus.rice.edu Rice University |
| (713) 527-8750 x3640, x3511 P.O. Box 1892 |
| FAX: (713) 285-5143 Houston, TX 77251-1892 |
*----------------------------------------------------------------------------*
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Complete responses:
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu, 01 Oct 92 17:50:42 -0400
From: Gustavo Vegas <gustavo@davinci.concordia.ca>
Message-Id: <9210011750.aa22542@davinci.concordia.CA>
Status: OR
Hello,
For what I've heard, there are upgrading possibilities, but
usually a bit expensive. We also have a (dismembered now) 3/280 whose
peripheral cards have been shoved into a 4/280, to soup it up. The little
I've heard about reviving the 3/280 with a Sparc VME board, has usually
been in the order of a few thousands, not worth for us. I'd like to
learn about the answers to your query, though.
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Date: Thu, 1 Oct 92 17:04:51 PDT
From: mc@msss.com (Mike Caplinger)
Message-Id: <9210020004.AA25816@msss.com>
To: pls@pegasus.rice.edu
Subject: Upgrading possibilities for a SUN 3/280.
Status: OR
I'd advise you to talk to your local Sun salesman to find out what the
current prices for upgrades are. We upgraded a 3/160 to a 4/670MP for
about $25,000, going from 3 to over 100 MIPS, etc. Not a bad deal.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu, 1 Oct 92 17:12:01 -0700
From: gwolsk@degas.sei.com (Guntram Wolski)
Message-Id: <9210020012.AA04748@degas.sei.com>
To: Patrick Shopbell <pls@pegasus.rice.edu>
In-Reply-To: <9210011643.AA05529@pegasus.rice.edu>
Subject: Upgrading possibilities for a SUN 3/280.
Status: OR
Patrick,
Some ideas.... Sun will be announcing a $5k machine at the
end of the year based on the Tsunami processor. This is an integrated
SS2 processor. It will be running on a 25MHz SBus and running
internally at 50MHz (see last weeks EE Times, this is all rumoured
information). I'm guessing it will hold 64M memory (4Mx9 70ns SIMMS
are running $100, so 64M = $1.6k). It will handle your SCSI drives,
but you can kiss your XYlogics drive bye(?). New drives are fairly
cheap (1G=$1.7k). I don't know how to handle the terminals easily,
since I've never dealt with it, but you can probably get an SBUS board
to do the same... I think you will be able to put together one heck
of a machine for under $10k when this new machine comes out. I don't
understand why you can't use the new drivers in 4.1.2 (I must be
missing something here).
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu, 1 Oct 92 19:18:29 PDT
Sender: jaf@inference.com
To: pls@pegasus.rice.edu
In-Reply-To: Patrick Shopbell's message of Thu, 1 Oct 92 11:43:51 CDT <9210011$
Subject: Upgrading possibilities for a SUN 3/280.
If your folks are writing their own C code, you should consider
obtaining and using the GNU C compiler: gcc. The current revision is
2.2.2 and it is available from PREP.AI.MIT.EDU. It produces very
efficient object code that may noticably improve performance of some of
your image processing.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 92 07:28:52 EDT
From: pjw@math30.sma.usna.navy.MIL (Peter J. Welcher -- math FACULTY <pjw@math$
Message-Id: <9210021128.AA07768@math30.sma.usna.navy.MIL>
To: pls@pegasus.rice.edu
Subject: Re: Upgrading possibilities for a SUN 3/280.
Status: OR
We're in that situation, with two of them.
We regard them as large 9 track tape drives.
For the price of a reasonable upgrade to them,
instead buy a desktop SPARC 2 or 10 with a 1 Gig server pack
(CD plus Exabyte plus SCSI disk). To save
some dollars, buy SCSI and memory from a vendor other than Sun.
This is very powerful and saves on space/power/air-conditioning.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 92 09:10:54 CDT
From: mdl@cypress.com (J. Matt Landrum)
Message-Id: <9210021410.AA05197@al.cypress.com>
To: pls@pegasus.rice.edu
Subject: Re: Upgrading possibilities for a SUN 3/280.
Status: OR
upgrade that bad boy to a galaxy (4/670 or 4/690)
You'll get a dual processor (> 50 Specmarks), 64 Mb system
with 4 1.3 Gb IPI disks and a CDROM for 50k. With a university
discount this should go down at least 12k. You'll have to
spend another $1k if you want the tape controller and Xylogix
tape controller to be supported. I don't believe the ALM-1
is supported. You'll have to buy an Sbus serial port board.
I would also seriousle consider bying an extra 64 Mb of memory
for it. One of the new 5 Gb exabytes is about 4k.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 02 Oct 92 09:18:05 -0500
Reply-To: sjh@math.purdue.edu
Subject: Re: Upgrading possibilities for a SUN 3/280.
From: sjh@math.purdue.edu
Patrick: We had a 3/280 with just about the same configuration as you
(2 575MB SMD drives and no CDROM), and about a year or year
and a half ago upgraded it to a 4/380 with a special deal from sun. I
don't think the deal is still in effect, though.
Earlier this year we added 2 670MP (4 processor) servers to provide
file service and compute service to the net. This didn't take any
load off of the 4/380, though.
Just yesterday we decided to replace the 4/380 altogether with a
Sparcstation II (which we already have) reconfigured as a server. We
have added an external scsi boot disk (1.3GB) to the 4/380, so that
will go onto the sparcstion when it becomes the server. We will lose
the use of the 1/2" tape drive, but we rarely use it anymore due to
the 8MM tapes (see below). We will also cut down significantly on the
heat load in the "machine room" (it's really an office with extra
air).
Why are we going to do this? The maintenance cost on the 4/380 and
the 2 SMD drives is killing us and the Sparcstion II is actually
faster than the 4/380. The 1.3GB SCSI more than replaces the
SMD drives and the maintenance cost is much much lower. The sparII
will be replaced with an IPC.
I don't understand your comment above about the exabytes. We have an
8MM (nee exabyte) tape on each of the 670s (running SunOS 4.1.2) and
they work ok (if you can deal with the problem of making them write at
5GB instead of 2.3GB).
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Subject: Re: Upgrading possibilities for a SUN 3/280.
To: pls@pegasus.rice.edu
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 92 10:48:12 MDT
From: era@niwot.scd.ucar.EDU (Ed Arnold)
You're going to have some problems getting to sparc. Sun no longer
supports the ALM1 under current OS releases. You could consider using
a terminal server on ethernet, or buying a used ALM2.
Your tape controller (I assume it's an xy472) is not "officially"
supported in current releases (4.1.2/4.1.3), nor is any type of
SMD disk controller. You can get a consulting special (GDS-CONSULT 1.4)
that guarantees xt & xd controllers will work under 4.1.2, but there
is no support for xy (450/451) controllers from anywhere, that I'm
aware of. Also, there's no guarantee that Sun will support xt/xd under
future releases (i.e. Solaris).
If you really want to go to sparc, it would be easiest to sack your
Xylogics disk, buy another SCSI disk, and sack your 1/2" tape in favor
of a 1/4", 8mm, or 4mm tape.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sat, 3 Oct 1992 23:17:03 -0700
To: pls@pegasus.rice.edu
Subject: Re: Upgrading possibilities for a SUN 3/280.
From: neil%wizard.uucp@ics.uci.edu
I would recomend an ELC, assuming you can load it with enough memory
(contact clearpoint or one of the many other memory vendors, they'll
be happy to tell you how much memory can be put in it 8-). Hard to
get a better bang for the buck. We're using an SLC for our main
server, works great. You SCSI stuff should move right along to it.
Scrap the 1/2" tape drive for an exabyte 8 mm (3 Gbyte these dasys, I
think). If you need serial/parallel ports, and don't have an Sbus in
your new machine (like an ELC, for instance 8-), or don't want to use
up an Sbus slot in it, we sell SCSI based serial/parallel port boxes.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 92 10:19:57 PDT
From: gbs@stratus.swdc.stratus.com (George B. Smith)
Message-Id: <9210061719.AA10048@echidna.swdc.stratus.com>
To: pls@pegasus.rice.edu
Subject: Re: Upgrading possibilities for a SUN 3/280.
We had two machines very similar to yours that we upgraded to a
Sun 4/380 merely by upgrading to a 4300 CPU and a new memory board.
The price from Sun was only $8k for the CPU and all of our peripherals
continued to work: 7053 SMD disks, SCSI-3 w/8mm, 1/2" tape on a
xy472 controller. We have been quite happy with the performance
improvement.
George B. Smith
gbs@swdc.stratus.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------
To: pls@pegasus.rice.edu
Subject: Re: Upgrading possibilities for a SUN 3/280.
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 1992 19:53:49 -0400
>From @rock.db.toronto.edu:jdd@db.toronto.edu Tue Oct 6 18:54:04 1992
Option 1: swap 3/200 CPU board for 4/200. All peripherals and memory as is.
Result: 4/280 with roughly 2x CPU performance. Cost: whatever
the part cost for the board is; I've seen people selling them for
$1-2k
Option 2: Buy a sparcstation. Move SCSI disk and CD-ROM to it. Keep the sun3 to
act as a terminal server (terminals and modems) and 1/2" tape
drive server. Cost= price of Sparcstation (eg. ELC: $4-5k). Result:
Machine with 3-4x performance in addition to your current one.
Option 3: Upgrade to a 6/690, get consulting option to run XY disk, 1/2" tape.
Cost: talk to sun, it's expensive. $20-30k?
Result: fast multiprocessor (8-16x CPU performance).
I'd go for option 2, myself.
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Original query:
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Hi folks.
I am the system administrator of the SUN 3/280 we have here
in the Space Physics department. It is our principle user machine,
with about 50 people using it, although primarily for e-mail, news,
etc. There is one research group of about 3 people that uses it
heavily for astronomical image processing, but that is about all
the heavy duty work it does. In light of this, I'm looking for some
ideas of upgrade possibilities - final machine types and approximate
prices would be great.
The technical configuration looks something like:
SUN 3/280 w/
1/2" tape drive
500 Mby XYLogics drive
1 Gby SCSI drive
SCSI CD-ROM
Boards: 1/2" tape controller
XYLogics disk controller
Memory board (-> 24 Mby total)
FFPA (floating point accel.)
ALM-1 (serial port multiplexor)
SCSI interface board
We have one X-terminal (3/50) off of this machine, plus a
number (~12) of ASCII terminals and a couple of modems. Obviously we'd
like to get up to SPARC. For example, we'd like to get an exabyte,
but are restricted from using the new drivers in OS 4.1.2.
I've shopped through old Sun Managers archives and sun-spots
with nothing obvious coming to light. Mail directly to me, and I'll
summarize to the list, as usual.
Thanks in advance!
Patrick
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