D390 Upgrade

[kevin poole_1]

I was wondering what the best upgrade for a D390 would be? I was thinking of going to an rx3600 to allow for future expansion. Is this a good choice or would someone recomend something else?
thanks, Kevin.

[Michael Steele_2]

Dear Kevin:

I would stay with PA Risc and go with a rp3410, rp3440 or rp4410 until Hp has worked more of Itanium's problems out.

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/North_America/11930.html

I have several Integrity servers in my shop and HP does not support many common enterprise applications on Itanium. See oracle, SAP, etc. An rx2600 here has been rebuilt from scratch twice, including the I/O backplane, (twice). They have funky boot up problems. The EFI shell can't protect itself from a careless user at the O/S level using the 'setboot' command. This is because the EFI shell has no error validation. Meaning, it can generate code real well using the 'setboot' command, but it could be all garbage because there's no parsing of errors! Additionally, there's no /var/tombstones any longer on Itanium servers, and therefore no record of HPMC's in ts99 files. This means diagnostics are funky. And you can see this in other ways with STM, Logtool and EMS, all of which have problems. For exmaple:

root 14633 4212 0 14:56:26 ? 0:00
root 4212 1 0 14:02:39 ? 0:02 /usr/sbin/stm/uut/bin/tools/monitor/ia64_corehw

The ia64 daemon spawns zombies, on purpose!

Stay PA-Risc as long as you can.

Good luck.

[Duncan Edmonstone]

hmmm, just my opinion but:

1) If you want to check if your app will run on HP Integrity systems look here:

https://h20299.www2.hp.com/hpslt/index.aspx?ReturnUrl=%2fCustomerTool%2fDefault.aspx

You'll need to register. If your app doesn't appear there then contact HP - it may still be supported. Oracle database 9i, 10g , application server 10g all run on Integrity. E busines suite 11i doesn't but will for r12 early next year... even JDE will be available in the next few weeks. Plenty of SAP components are also available.

2. Any criticism of the server components in an Integrity server is also a criticisim of the components in a HP9000, as with the exception of firmware and CPU effectively the same systems. The rp34xx actually has the same IO backplane as the rx26xx.

3. The ability to screw up the system through root priviliged commands was and always will be there - ever used mkboot -a and entered an invalid AUTO boot string? You can do this on PA-RISC and Integrity - I don't see this as a reason not to use Integrity systems.

4. Never had to deal with one, but a Machine Check end (equivalent of a HPMC on Itanium), should generate a file strating with mca in /var/tombstones. A quick trawl of the ITRC knowledgebase turned up a few firmware releases that fixed this not always happening on some systems.

5. The ia64_corehw defunct process issue is a 'feature' (OK its probably bad design! But it does no harm, and the number of zombie processes doesn't go up). There's a KB article about it - doc id 8606382520

HTH

Duncan

[Michael Steele_2]

Dear Duncan:

Please respond to the author, and not to other forum members posting answers.

Additionally, out of 65 HP servers in my shop, a representation of 2/3 overall, only about 40% of our clients our planning on staying with HP and Itanium. The rest are migrating off to Linux, Aix or Solaris. These are long time HP customers who have researched into Integrity servers and have decided not to buy them, due to there instability.

I suggest you not read PR publications and get some experience on the actual equipment.

Thanks!

PS This is why you shouldn't respond to other forum postings.

PPS Regarding EFI shell, have you ever really done a EFI boot list?

[Duncan Edmonstone]

Michael,

ok.. I know I'm responding to you again (sorry kevin), but bear with me...

You're right I should respond to the poster, not you. If my post offended or overstepped the mark, I'll ask a forums moderator to remove it (and this post too if you like). For the record I have used EFI extensively and yes I prefer BCH on PA-RISC. Not sure what these PR documents that I'm referencing are.
I won't comment further - I'm not looking for an argument here.

Duncan

[Duncan Edmonstone]

Kevin,

Can you tell us a little more about the D390 - what sort of spec it has, what OS version you're running, what application it hosts?

Duncan