Advice wanted on fileservers and net-loading

[Neil Gorsuch]

pcl at robots.oxford.ac.uk (Paul Leyland) writes:
>I would welcome advice, thoughts and opinions on the following problem.
>How do we upgrade a small-to-medium size system into a medium-to-large
>size one?
>
>The question is: how can we best achieve this?  "Best" includes ease of
>adminstration, floor-space required and maintenance, as well as low cost.

I recently had a conversation with a gentleman at Los Alamos National
Laboratory about the relative merits and costs of using 3/50's and 3/xxx's
as files servers for diskless clients.  He pointed out that a 3/50 for
about $3500 and a 300 Mb CDC Wren shoebox drive system for about $2900,
total about $6400, will serve 3 to 5 diskless 3/50's or 3/60's without any
problems whatsoever, as long as the server 3/50 is only used as a server.
In fact, the stock 4 Mbytes of memory is more than adequate for the
network server daemons and Sunos.  Compare that to maybe 5 to 10 times as
much money for an "official" sun 3/xxx server with eagle drives that can
handle 15 or so diskless clients comfortably, and the price/performance
ratio  is clearly in favor of using 3/50's as file servers.  If backup is
a concern, buy an Exabyte 2 Gbyte 8 mm tape drive from someone for about
$4500.  This route is more of a pain to setup, but the total cost
reductions are quite dramatic.

neil at cpd.com
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(714) 547-3000