Hardware Wanted

Anyone in the UK have any OpenVMS capable workstation hardware ? I'm after an Alpha or Itanium, e.g. Alphastation, PWS, ZX2000/6000 etc.

If it helps, I also have a 600Mhz Fuel (V12/2Gb) and a 2x400Mhz Octane 2 (V10/1Gb) in great condition. I'd consider trading one or both of them (or adding them to an offer), depending on what turns up.

Ta!

-Mark

I have a digital DS10 maxed out (not DS10L), but I live in the US.
It runs digital unix, windows NT/2000, openvms, and a few opensourced OS.
if anyone is interesed...

You might want to look at small servers.

Itanium workstation hardware is rare, as are late Alpha workstations. In addition, many Alpha workstations had WinNT-only parts and/or are very expensive. OpenVMS really doesn't gain much from having a local framebuffer, anyway.

Only problem with going down the "small server" route is noise. Most of the time it won't bother me, but the system will have to be located in the same room as my "music room", so I really need it to be quiet as possible. I appreciate total silence is just never going to happen on an Alpha or Itanium system, but if I could avoid the "Jet taking off" effect, it'd be much more pleasant

I have an XP1000 that should run VMS with a dead power supply if anyone is looking for a project.

R.

Interested - but shipping from Australia to the UK would probably be prohibitive

I'm interested in this thread also. What small servers will work for OpenVMS and what would a fair price be?

See http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/23 - follow the links to pointers on Alpha and Integrity kit. For Alpha, the DS10L seemed to be a popular choice a few years ago. Vax is not really worth bothering with given the ease with which you can run OpenVMS under SimH on x86. Unless of course, you really want the experience of running it on the real kit, but an emulated Vax is going to be much more flexible, not to mention better performing.

-Mark

Thanks for the link I will read it. I like emulators for things that are impossible to get anymore, but when you can run real hardware it's usually better.

Is there such a thing as a cheap/decent 1U itanium box because people are moving off them(?) or are people hoarding them since they're afraid they're not going to be made anymore?

rx1600/1620 is pretty much your 1U option for Integrity, and as with pretty much all other OpenVMS HW the "inexpensive" option involves finding someone nearby getting rid of one. The reseller market is pretty strong, so prices are high.

I probably have something that would suit you. I'm up in Windermere.

With regard to bluecode's questions. There are various Alpha based workstations which aren't too noisy, don't draw stupid power and aren't too large. One example would be the AlphaServer 300. Most hobbyists aren't too worried about outright performance. I find that the smaller alphas or faster VAXen (such as the VAXstation 4000 series) are very hobbyist friendly. The VAXstation 4000/VLC still crops up second hand now and again, is a small pizza box, will drive a sync-on-green panel at 1280x1024, has 6 VUPS and draws 50 watts. It's a bit limited with only 24MB, but good for exploring the basics of VMS. Also works very well as an X-terminal with all the VMS specific bits to access a server which you can put elsewhere (in my case an AlphaServer 1000A).

The Itanium boxes are somewhat the opposite, power hungry, noisy and quite large. The ZX6000 has the 'office friendly' kit which makes it fairly quiet. Although it isn't officially supported by OpenVMS it runs 8.4 fine. It also takes 3.5" SCA SCSI drives which are cheaper to purchase than the 2.5" SAS SCSI variety. I don't use the ZX6000 anywhere near as much as Alpha and VAX hardware.

Thanks guys. Urban Camo, what boxes do you have in mind and do you know how much they weigh? If not I'll look them up and see if I could possibly afford shipping. Or feel free to PM me but I am pretty broke right now so please don't take offense if I can't work something out.

I have a zx6000 and it's amazingly quiet - almost inaudible. Granted, I don't push much load on it and since it's basically an rx2600-with-agp-cage, it runs VMS just fine, as long as you keep an eye on the graphics.

They're not that easy to find though. I had to ship mine from Ireland. Thing arrived in a pretty sorry state, but luckily everything was still working.

Out of curiosity, how much power does it draws?

A ZX6000 with a single PSU, two 1.3Ghz Madison class processors, three 15k hard drives and 16GB of RAM idles at 380 watts. If you were to remove drives, a processor and some RAM you could probably make quite a dent in this figure.

They are a lovely box. I *could* have had a similar situation to Alver - mine was delivered rattling around in a very shoddy box - this is apparently a prime cause of the plastic stands breaking. I was really lucky and everything survived. They *do* look really smart with the floor standing kit attached, the dimensions are all weird though - a full length 2U rack mount enclosure turned on its' side. Definitely desk-side rather than desk-top!

Those do look nice but 25Kg is going to require friends in the shipping business or a local find as you guys said. That is light for a 2U tho.

380W!

I think the Altix 350 is roughly 250W with 2x1.5Ghz I2 and a few disks. Why such discrepancy?

Probably the graphics. The ZX6000 is a workstation whereas the Altix is a server. Moreover, the ZX6000 probably has an AGP Pro graphics slot that can supply up to 110W to the graphics card alone. And since HP was selling the ZX6000s as high-end graphics workstations, it's a safe assumption that there's a power-hungry AGP Pro graphics card in there taking full advantage of the AGP Pro slot, not some wimpy entry-level card.

Newer generation processors and disks could also account for some of the reduced power consumption of the Altix.

Of course, all of this is just speculation on my part, not having either of the machines in my collection.

You know I can't remember what graphics card it had in at the time I measured the draw - you could be right, when I got the box it had an ATI Fire Pro GL AGP graphics card which runs great under Gentoo Linux but isn't supported under OpenVMS or HP/UX (unless you happen to have *exactly* the right version for 2004, drivers, etc.)

When using OpenVMS it's a PCI ATI 7500 graphics card which probably only draws a few watts. I may take the time to re-evaluate the power usage now, shouldn't take long!

Mark.