Hello Fellow Sys Admins -
I know most of these questiosn have been answered over the past
few months, but I am going to ask for my specific situation. I
just received e-mail to have a list of possible hardware to buy
for a Monday afternoon meeting to decide how to spend some end
of fiscal year fallout money.
I have an old Alpha 4620 machine, one of the first sables (2100),
five 3000s, a handful of each of the AS 200, AS 250, AS 400, AS 500,
AS 400. I have two 1GB disk and one 2GB disk in the 4620 and it is
my C2 NIS and NFS fileserver. I have one 2GB disk and two 4GB disks
in the 2100. It also serves two filesystems, one on each of the
4GB disks. Our local/non-DEC software is on the 4620 but there is
not enough room to hold all the needed software so it is farmed
out to other disks in our other machines. I also have three SGI
machines and 18 SUN boxes.
My users are faculty, staff, students and post-doc researchers at
a graduate school in the department of aeronautics and astronautics.
They do a ton of finite element analysis and we need a lot of disk
space, good print capabilities and excellent backups. We of course
do not have much money. Like everyone else we need the biggest bang
for our bucks.
Part of my wish list is a wish for more disk space preferrably in a
fileserver or RAID array. From my needs and your experience, what
would you suggest? A DEC product or not? What size disks? ADVFS or
UFS? Prices appreciated even though we should receive educational
discount.
I also want good printing. Right now I have an HP5M that is okay
except for my users who are creating text files on the unix machines.
It is fantastic for the Postscript files on the UNIX and for PC
printing. I would like something that will be better for the text
files. DEC, HP, QUME, what do you suggest? Both black/white and
color would be appreciated. Prices appreciated even though we should
receive educational discount.
Now the one I find hardest to decide on, backup. I would like an
autoloader or robotic tape drive. What format is best these days,
8mm, 4mm DAT (I have had bad experiences with these), AIT, LMI (?)
or another. DEC or another vendor? Any input appreciated. and
as always, prices appreciated even though we should receive educational
discount.
I hope these really are all my questions. Too bad if not, less than
24 working hours to do this is a joke.
Thank you and have a great weekend.
Kris Larsen
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Kristin L. Larsen aka) "Hey you!"
System Administrator, AFIT/ENY
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio
ICES contractor
klarsen_at_afit.af.mil AFIT e-mail
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Received on Fri Aug 07 1998 - 20:15:55 NZST