Silicon Graphics Iris 3130 Reliability

[brunner at sri-spam.UUCP]

In article <4916 at bu-cs.BU.EDU> mike at bucasb.UUCP (Michael Cohen) writes:
>Please let me know what you know about the reliability
>of the Iris Silicon Graphics workstations.  I heard that
>the system reliability is very low via rumor posted on
>INFO - IRIS.  Please let me know as reliability is an
>issue and we may purchase shortly.

I don't read INFO - IRIS, sorry I can't scan your rumor.

When I worked at SGI the 3030 model (68020 w/ large disks) in my office
failed _very_ frequently, like twice a day - here failure is defined as a
_very_ reliable hardware _freak_ event, thought to be due to design errors
in the power subsystem, no, bogus disk controllers, no,... there was no
known answer before I left the company.

Most of the 10 or so new machines in the same area of the company (kernel
group) were equally eventfull. We all sighed and rebooted, hardware was
not our dept...

Please note that this was the view of a neo-dozen production machines of the
3030 model, all with a similar date of production, summer 1986, and all kept
with in a small portion of the 2nd floor of the engineering bldg of the
Stierlin Road site.  Maybe they got fixed, maybe you are referring to some
other model.

I would look elsewhere, of course, my reasons are not necessarily the same
as yours. I take into consideration the system software because that seems
to me as important as the window manager and the pixel painting primitives
Due to the SGI-only XNS dependency, and the TCP-on-a card of the 1986 IRIS,
it is a very hard machine to use in a distributed workstation environment,
where some of the workstations just happen to be very sharp color graphics
boxes.

I think that is what is important in my site's long term, and in just about
any hetrogeneous, open site, so I don't think about the IRIS seriously.
I'm making that point to the Navy - who wish to use it for a _very_ snazy
mailer system - they saw the SGI demos, not the network nor the "useability".
-- 
how about a great big spidery "X"?