I just paid $400 for a used Alphaserver 4100

a_unique_person

Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning
a_unique_person
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It has about 150GB SCSI disk drives, two racks, 2*processors, 2GB memory and 1 DLT tape drive, with assorted paraphenalia.

What should I do with it? While it would be nice to just look at it, or maybe paint it in a hippie colour scheme, I am sure there must be something useful I can do with it besides break it up and sell it at the swap meet for parts. And, if I am lucky, even make a small profit.
 
a_unique_person said:
It has about 150GB SCSI disk drives, two racks, 2*processors, 2GB memory and 1 DLT tape drive, with assorted paraphenalia.

What should I do with it? While it would be nice to just look at it, or maybe paint it in a hippie colour scheme, I am sure there must be something useful I can do with it besides break it up and sell it at the swap meet for parts. And, if I am lucky, even make a small profit.
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Donate it to JREF
 
I am DEFINITELY available to take ownership of it - price VERY negotiable?
 
With or without hippie paint scheme?

Do you just want it for your museum? If so, there is also a much bigger 8100 server that needs 3 phase power that they want to get rid of, but that is strictly for the fanatics, not the slightly eccentric like me. It has about 4GB RAM, one 9GBHD and about 4*processors. Only used to mail out financial statements on a Sunday.
 
a_unique_person said:
With or without hippie paint scheme?

With, without, paint it Mission Brown - who cares!

Do you just want it for your museum?

Yes, but not as an exhibit (just yet).

If so, there is also a much bigger 8100 server that needs 3 phase power that they want to get rid of, but that is strictly for the fanatics, not the slightly eccentric like me. It has about 4GB RAM, one 9GBHD and about 4*processors. Only used to mail out financial statements on a Sunday.

*drool* So, apart from the fact we have no 3-phase and no space to put it, sure! As long as it is gratis...
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I think it has a nobler purpose than breaking it up for parts. Why not fill it w/ porn and get it online? ;)
 
HELP!!!

I have pulled bits of it out to have a bit of a gander. Now I know why there is a very annoying sliding steel foot at the bottom of the frame. It is so you can slide the actual computer assembly out and stop it tipping the frame over.

However, now that I have slid it out, and seen the power supply, (very impressive), and CPU/Memory cage (also impressive, I love American engineering), I can't slide it back in. One of the rails is stuck, although the other one is fine. Zep, what should I be looking for? How much do you want to pay?

Another site I worked on had a nice little alpha, that you could open up quite easily. It must have been the next model below this one. This one is an industrial stinker. I am going to rip out the "storage works" racks, pick out all the 36GB disks, and flog the rest at the swap meet to {hopefully} make my money back.

As for the 8400, anyone want a cheap but very good machine, one owner, for you, a very good price. Lots of CPUs and memory.
 
PM me some pictures of the unit if you can. Definitely sounds like a rackmount job. Talk to me offline about the StorageWorks stuff too - it may not be the goldmine you may think it is...

The Alpha 8400 series running Rdb (database) held the world tpm record for a number of years in the late 1990's. Being true 64-bit, it uses Very Large Memory ability to run databases in core for outstanding peformance. It was the backbone of the first Alta Vista operation. If you want, it can indeed run UNIX and Apache through multiple high-speed Ethernet ports. It can be partitioned using its Galaxy capability, and each partition can be clustered CPU's and can be dedicated to UNIX, NT or OpenVMS. CPU's can be hot-swapped, as can most of the memory and power components. And it can still pump out a VERY impressive performance even today - way more than the vast majority of small businesses would ever need.

Put that all together and you could configure a very powerful and reliable backend, webserving and firewall system, completely clustered for redundancy, all inside one box. Mind you, the power and cooling bill would be significant - it's definitely a "computer room" system!

Neh. Or you could chuck it out and get some el cheapo Intel boxes running not-bullet-proof software with so-so redundancy capabilities that break down every other day...

:D :D :D
 
You don't pay $400 for a goldmine, I can assure you. All I was interested in was the disks, at a minimum. I could pay $200 for a nice big IDE HD, or buy this and get a real RAID and much faster disks. If I have to, I will get the angle grinder out and chop it up. But first I will head off to the swap meet, and see if someone can actually use this stuff.
 
At a place I used to work, we bought an Alpha 533mhz box to test. We benched it versus a dual-pentium pro 200. Running mostly single-threaded apps.

We tested it running NT and Linux.

Our prognosis was that alpha was more overrated than sparc.

Kidding, I hear these boxes run like a sailor to a red light when running Dec operating systems but that NT/Linux don't exploit the Alpha fully.

All I know is, it was much slower than the Intel system at serving web pages or at running a sql server and since we were in web hosting the alpha was useless to us. We wound up making it a QuakeWorld server for our own lan matches.
 
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