[HECnet] DECnet Area Router question

[Mark Wickens]

Zane H. Healy wrote:


On Fri, 4 Jun 2010, Mark Wickens wrote:

My power consumption page might help a bit:
http://lakesdev.blogspot.com/2008/09/power-consumption-of-computers-and.html 

The VAXstation 4000/VLC takes the lowest power but at about 6 VUPS it is
quite slow. The 4000/60 and 4000/90 (BUBBLE) take about 100 Watts, which
is twice as much, but are *so* much more usable.

In terms of alpha, the lowest power I've found so far is the Alphaserver
300 4/266 (TIGER) which clocks at about 100 watts. The Alphaserver 1000A
runs at about 180 watts which is pretty good given the expansion
possibilities (it has a BA356 8 drive enclosure built in).

I'm currently running a BUBBLE and TIGER 24/7 which is a VAX and Alpha
node for 200 watts total.

Mark.

My VAXstation 4000/VLC has a dead power supply.   Plus the BA353 I was using
it on it has a dead powersupply.   Those two bits originally made up PDXVAX. The current PDXVAX hardware is a VAXstation 4000/60 and a BA350 (with 1 2GB
drive).   My VAXstation 4000/90 has issues, but I forget what.

MONK is currently a XP1000 with three SCSI buses.   The Narrow SCSI drives a
TLZ06, the FWD-SCSI drives a DLT7000 drive, and then the U2W-SCSI has 2 JBOD
boxes with 3 36GB 10k drives each.

I'm thinking something like an AlphaStation 200 4/233 or even DEC 3000/133
with a BA350 and 2-3 4GB drives.   That would definitely be a bit more
affordable power wise than MONK and PDXVAX combined.   In fact less than 10
years ago, that was the hardware MONK was running on.

Oh, and yes, I have a preference for external HD's.   I have a lot of 4GB
SBB's for BA350's and a lot of SCA SCSI HD's, but very few drives I can use
internally without opening up SBB's.

Zane


The Alphaserver 300 4/266 known as TIGER was running a 2GB internal drive, but that wasn't big enough for me to load the SPLs, Freeware and my own gubbins. It has a wide ultra scsi pci controller card, so I got a 73GB 3.5" internal drive off ebay for GBP 15 which is working very nicely within the 100 watts mentioned previously. I have a BA356 (which I had a 16 bit personality module for but no cable until recently) and a stash of new 4.3GB SBBs but if I plug that in I'm running another 50 watts again - that's why I prefer to have one big internal drive, although the BA356 is very convenient for backups and data transfer, as is my external DDS3 DAT drive.

Mark.