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Of the Love of Oldtimers - Dusting Off a Sun Fire V1280 Server

Posted by Unknown on from the mine-bitcoins-while-heating-your-home dept.

vikingpower writes "Today, I decided to acquire a refurbished Sun Fire V1280 server, with 8 CPUs. The machine will soon or may already belong to a certain history of computing. This project is not about high-performance computing, much more about lovingly dusting off and maintaining a piece of hardware considered quirky by 2013 standards. And Now the question creeps to mind: what software would Slashdotters run on such a beast, once it is upgraded to 12 procs and, say, 24 GiB of RAM ?"

7 of 281 comments (clear)

  1. I must be getting old by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    It doesn't seem too long ago 8 Ultrasparcs and 12GB of RAM was the shit. It must really hurt to pull that invoice from 2005 out...

    1. Re:I must be getting old by CapeBretonBarbarian · · Score: 5, Informative

      There is a port of open source Illumos / Opendiana that should work on this hardware :

      http://opensxce.org

      Solaris 11 will not work on this hardware, but sxce should work.

  2. Re:Keep it Vintage by mcmonkey · · Score: 4, Informative

    This thing ain't vintage. It's just old.

    Hang on to it for 10 years. Then it might be vintage.

  3. Needs lots of power by hawguy · · Score: 4, Informative

    Hope you don't pay much for your electricity, fully populated and busy, that server is going to draw around 3000W of power.

    With that power draw, if you're paying $0.12/KWh for electricity, it would cost around $250/month to keep it powered, not including cooling costs.

  4. can you please donate it to GNU compile farm by decora · · Score: 5, Informative

    they will stick Debian on it and people will use it to port free software.

    they do have a sunfire but it's almost out of disk space and there are tons of people using it already.

  5. Re:seconed debian by puregen1us · · Score: 4, Informative

    At the moment we're fighting to remove all the legacy Sun systems from our datacenters, and love the chance to remove these old machines.

    They're rock solid, and do a great job. Our databases still run very very well on them, frequently more stabily than newer X86 kit they're being replaced with.

    However:

    1) Power usage is insane. The datacenter team reported the larger boxes (ie, 12U type beasts like this) use the same power as whole racks of the standard IBM/HP type pizza boxes we can replace them with. Modern Xeons are multi-cored/multi-threaded enough to compete seriously with the older SPARCs, and do a good job of it, without needing their own power station too fuel and cool them.

    2) Parts are getting harder to find, and vastly more expensive. As they age the cost of supporting them sky-rockets, and with parts being harder to find if something breaks there is downtime to fix it. That's not a good situation to be in. Indivual parts for these old machines (eg. spare HBA card, etc) are now becoming as expensive as a new replacement system.

  6. Ha uhm.... what kind of company is this? by decora · · Score: 4, Informative

    If you work at a financial institituion, this is the kind of s**** that will lose millions of dollars.

    There are a lot of things that only come up quarterly, or yearly, and things where the effects wont be known until months or years later.

    so if someone does task X on February 15 but it doesnt show on a report until July, and then you shut it off on Feb 16th, that means it will be over a year before anyone finds out.