Reliability of Sun 3/50's

[ben ullrich]

In article <8811102030.AA03003 at helios> you write:
>X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 7, Issue 21, message 10 of 12
>
>The question before us, as we contemplate acquisition of our sixth and
>seventh Sun 3/50-ME-4, is 'to maintain or not to maintain?'.  Has anyone
>out there had conclusive experience of the failure rate of 3/50's in a
>normal office environment (no a/c, isolation-txformer-type power
>conditioning)?...

we have several 3/60's in operation here, and they have been generally
running perfectly for a year or so. we've had sun equipment since 1985,
and have had minimal problems with it. boards so go out from time to time,
but things have improved with each new model sun puts out.

the deciding factor for us when choosing to get sun's next-day maint. was
the fact that whenever we had a failure, most of our systems are so
important we couldn't afford (from a user-need standpoint) to have the
machines down... that decided it for us. but, as i said, the equipment
doesn't really fail that much at all.

the first 3/50 we ever bought (2 years or so old now) is used by the sales
group for on-the-road demos of our database server & front end tools.
after at least 50 sales demos all over the country, this machine has yet
to fail.

i'd say skip the to-of-the-line service if you can afford to have a system
down for a day or two. but it is my belief that thhe systems don't fail
that much to begin with, so the above need for downtime shouldn't happen
very often at all.
-- 
...ben
--
ben ullrich
sybase, inc.
emeryville, ca			{pyramid,pacbell,sun,lll-tis,capmkt}!sybase!ben
(^^^^^^^^^== nowhere usa) 	ben%sybase.com at sun.com