New VAX 6000 toys.

From: Brian Chase <vaxzilla_at_jarai.org>
Date: Tue Oct 15 17:45:00 2002

On Tue, 15 Oct 2002, Corda Albert J DLVA wrote:

> Yep, I just noticed one on ebay a little bit ago... I'm seriously
> thinking about it... Are these equivalent to the full-blown 6000
> systems that I've seen show up in the past? What are you giving
> up by going with the rack-mount version? Also, anyone have
> a guess as to how heavy these are? (UPS shipable?)

The main difference with this box is that it's not as expandable as a
full VAX 6000. The big ones have ample space within them for disk
drives, tape drives, and BI bus card cages. I think the full VAX 6000s
come standard with one, maybe two BI bus card cages.

These rackmount boxes only have an XMI bus. I suppose it'd be possible
to hang BI busses off of this with an external box; that's if you needed
to do so. As far as I can tell, there's no room for internal storage
devices, so these systems will have to be netbooted or connected to CI
attached disk drives. Given that these 6000s come with multiple
ethernet interfaces, a FDDI interface, and a CI module--all of these
will be options if you've got a little bit of infrastructure. The folks
on comp.os.vms say that it's easy to boot this type of system over an
ethernet based VAXcluster. Your disk I/O will be bottlenecked by the
speed of the ethernet. I'm planning on running mine this way initially.

I'd estimate the weight at somewhere between 150-200lbs. The seller
shipped my stuff FedEx Ground. To ship it from Phoenix to SoCal cost a
little more than $60 with full insurance. I've had very good luck with
FedEx Ground in the past; I'd even say I prefer them to UPS. I'm a
little biased though--my first "sizeable" VAX, a MicroVAX-II in BA123,
was delivered by UPS. I watched in horror as the guy dropped it off the
back of his truck from a height of about 4-5ft right onto the concrete.
The VAX was rather badly dented, most all of the plastic bits were
broken, and the plastic top was sheered off its bolts. I was not
amused. Surprisingly, the VAX still ran fine, but it took a lot of
epoxy and dent hammering to make it look presentable.

-brian.
Received on Tue Oct 15 2002 - 17:45:00 BST