On Thu, 11 Nov 2004 01:40:11 GMT, JohnM
<jmadd_NOFREAKINGSPAM@austin.rr.com> wrote:

>Hi,
>I just want to get a quick take on what people think about the
>reliability of the F50s.
>
>We just bought one and we're planning on putting some fairly important
>stuff running on it and want to know what kind of reliability we can
>expect. We bought this one off ebay. The software (CMVC!*) has been
>running reliably on a little ol' 43P for over 5 years, but I'm tired of
>putting up with the poor perormance. The F50's a big step up - quad CPUs
>and 3GB memory. I'm not crazy about buying a second F50 for a cold
>spare but plan on being able to fall back on the 43P with suitable
>savevg's just in case.
>
>We run a lot of Netfinity 4500R's and have found them to have a common
>problem with VRM/Motherboard failures. I just want to see if there's any
>such common failure with the F50 and would appreciate any feedback along
>those lines.
>
>*Yeah, I know CMVC isn't supported anymore, but the old "if it ain't
>broke don't fix it" applies, and we've not yet found anything else that
>works as well for our development model and isn't an overpriced pile of
>crap.
>
>Thanks!
>John

We bought our F50 back in 1998 and it's still being used as main
database server (Oracle8i) for our Accounts and Purchasing Depts.
Later on we did some updrades from 1 CPU/512M RAM to 4CPU/2G RAM, put
extra ULTRA3 controllers and 18 disk spindles into it (be careful with
SCSI cables if installing 6-packs yourself, they can be damaged fairly
easily). We upgraded AIX as well from 4.2.1 to 4.3.3 ML11.
As of now the machine works fine, NEVER had crashes since 1998, uptime
is 936 days as of today (after changing the network card to Gigabit
Ethernet and rebooting), the only problem we had is SCSI disks failed
couple of times but since they're all mirrored - we just replaced and
re-mirrored them.

Alex