I Sysadmined a VMS box running on a couple of AlphaServers (2100 and 2100A) if I recall.
At one point a disgruntled employee had taken a 22 rifle into the server room and shot several rounds at the equipment, only 1 bullet hit, but it went through a RAM bank, the system disabled the faulty hardware and continued running.
The other cool part was the interchangeable boards - the system had a case that swung open on the side and you could insert cards much the same way as you slot in PCI cards today, except one of the cards could be a CPU block, or it could be RAM, so if you had a CPU intensive workload you could disable a physical board of ram, take it out, and replace with a CPU board - without halting or rebooting the OS
Ever work with Sun servers? Yeah, you could swap out cards, CPU, ram, drive, power, without halting or rebooting the OS. But not just Sun servers. This is not a feature unique to Alphaservers/VMS.
It was originally a DEC specific design copied/stolen by others. DEC created the design concept of a common back plane. Other than some logic switches to control power/enabling, there was nothing it provided. Every machine was completely customizable.
I'm not a hardware buy, but I believe this is a carry over from the VAX days long before there was SUN.
The Alphas had a motherboard and daughterboard - and the daughterboard was a generalized bus, so a single slot could have a RAM or CPU slot in it --- were Sun servers capable of this too? Or was a RAM slot a RAM slot and a CPU slot a CPU slot and they were not interchangeable?
I'm curious because I've never seen any other machines with a generalized CPU/RAM bus, I'm curious if Sun hardware supported this? If it did, can you remember the model numbers so I can read up on it?
I Sysadmined a VMS box running on a couple of AlphaServers (2100 and 2100A) if I recall.
At one point a disgruntled employee had taken a 22 rifle into the server room and shot several rounds at the equipment, only 1 bullet hit, but it went through a RAM bank, the system disabled the faulty hardware and continued running.
The other cool part was the interchangeable boards - the system had a case that swung open on the side and you could insert cards much the same way as you slot in PCI cards today, except one of the cards could be a CPU block, or it could be RAM, so if you had a CPU intensive workload you could disable a physical board of ram, take it out, and replace with a CPU board - without halting or rebooting the OS