Would a SUN Sparc system perhaps meet your needs, Jay? Other than the
Intel/AMD processors, the only other commercially viable chips available
that I am aware of are the IBM PowerPC and the Sparc. I'm not including
the S/390 chip here because of their relativity high cost and difficulty
of actually getting one....:-)
DB is certainly correct in pointing out that the repair costs of an M3K
are out of sight. when we had an M3K here (and yes, they are easily
usable from a home office environment), we had problems with the disk
drives failing after unscheduled power outages (read: local
thunderstorms....). Since the machine was at that time still under
warranty, IBM would come out and replace the failing disk drive, and we
never lost any data. IBM finally got to the point where they actually
kept a couple of spare drives here on hand so the CE would not have to
stop at the parts place to pick up one on his way out here....:-)
DJ
Jay Maynard wrote:
On Tue, Feb 20, 2007 at 09:51:18AM -0500, David Boyes wrote:
I think I'd probably recommend another Alpha, or a medium sized Intel
box. Of course, if it was mine and budget was no object, I'd get a small
Itanium box and run VMS or TOPS-20 on it. 8-) But, I'm weird that way.
The goal here is to get away from the Alpha, because there's not much
development work going on for it any more. Linux for the mainframe doesn't
have that problem. (Is that true enough of the 31-bit versions?) Under no
circumstances will I run an x86 or x86_64 platform natively as a server on
the net.
Don't get me wrong, folks: the only reason I'm looking at other solutions
besides Hercules is that I'm not too sure about the overall reliability of
PC-class hardware in 24x7 service. It's otherwise more than good enough and,
I believe, fast enough (especially given the speed of the DSL it'll be
talking over).
OTOH, David Boyes's comments on the MP3000's power supply are certainly
giving me pause...especially since the last failure I had on the Alphaserver
was a power supply.
--
Jay Maynard, K5ZC http://www.conmicro.cx
http://jmaynard.livejournal.com http://www.tronguy.net
http://www.hercules-390.org (Yes, that's me!)
Buy Hercules stuff at http://www.cafepress.com/hercules-390
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