New VAX 6000 toys.

From: Corda Albert J DLVA <CordaAJ_at_NSWC.NAVY.MIL>
Date: Wed Oct 16 12:22:00 2002

OK, I finally dug out my DEC systems & options catalogs, and found
a couple of references to the rack-mount 6000 in the 1990 and 1991
catalogs. These were originally sold as two 19" rack-mountable enclosures,
one containing the XMI cardcage, and the other containing a BI cardcage.
Both enclosures appear very similar, with the main difference being that
the XMI enclosure has a very small front panel on it. The BI enclosure
seems
to have a cutout on the front panel for a TK70 tape drive and _no_ front
panel. The earlier catalogs treat the 2 cardcages as 1 complete system,
while the later catalogs refer to the 19" rack BI enclosure as an "option".

Not being greatly familiar with the 6000, am I correct in assuming that
if you don't have the BI "option" you have not I/O capability whatsoever?
(except for possibly ethernet? how about SCSI?)

-al-



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Antonio Carlini [mailto:Antonio.Carlini_at_riverstonenet.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, October 16, 2002 5:21 AM
> To: cctalk_at_classiccmp.org
> Subject: RE: New VAX 6000 toys.
>
>
>
> >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.
>
> My VAX 6000 is no longer here, so I have to go on memory.
> Pretty much all
> there is in a standard 6000 is a row of PSUs at the top, a
> row with the
> VAXBI and XMI busses and - right at the bottom - a
> converter/coditioner
> that takes the incoming power feed and presents it to the
> rest of the box.
> There is a large gap with plenty of air in it. About the only
> thing you could
> use it for was a late-breaking internal storage addon. Every 6000 I've
> seen had external storage (mostly via CI, since that's what
> big customers
> were expected to do).
>
> Internally it cannot have been much wider that 19" so I would
> guess that the
> rack-mount version would be about the same but without the large wad
> of air :-)
>
> >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
>
> Is there no space for a VAXBI? My box had an XMI to the right and two
> VAXBIs to the left (IIRC).
>
> >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've done this - it works well. Especially nice is botting from an
> InfoServer for upgrades etc.
>
> Antonio
> arcarlini_at_iee.org
>
Received on Wed Oct 16 2002 - 12:22:00 BST