Advice Wanted on File Servers for a Diskless Network

[Duncan McEwan]

Our department will shortly be buying a small number of (20 or so) diskless
workstations for staff and graduate student use.

The options currently appear to be a mixture of Sun 3/50's and 3/60's, or HP
9000 series 300 model 318's (I think similar in max config to a Sun 3/50 except
you *can't* put a local disk on it - they are about 20% cheaper than the 3/50,
possibly because of this fact).  An alternative might be IBM PS/2's running AIX
but we are not sure if they can function in an NFS based diskless environment.

The two problems are deciding on the appropriate file servers, and figuring
out which workstation(s) to buy.

The local Sun agents have suggested that for 20 or so workstations we might be
looking at two Sun 3/180's to handle the load.  HP's suggestion was similar but
based on HP 9000 model 350's.  But with these file server machines costing
approx $NZ70,000 (approx $US45,000) each we would like to look at other
alternatives.

One alternative might be a single Sun-4, although I am not sure how much that
will cost.

Another option is that as part of the same equipment proposal we hope to
upgrade our current pyramid 90x (8Mb main memory - no data cache) to a pyramid
9805 or 9810 with probably 16Mb memory).  The pyramid's main task would be to
support 30-50 undergraduate and graduate student's (not simultaneously).  Would
it also be able to support the load of acting as a file server for the above
number of diskless workstations doing typical (whatever that is) work?  If it
cannot support the load by itself, what about an upgraded pyramid in
conjunction with a single Sun or HP file server?

Regarding the choice of workstation.  I believe it is possible for Sun
workstations to boot over NFS now, rather than using the old "nd" protocol.
Would this be possible with a Pyramid acting as a file server, or would we need
at least one Sun file server?  Can the HP workstations running HP/UX also boot
over NFS?  Would they be able to boot from a non-HP file server?  How well
could we expect a mixed environment of diskless Sun's and HP's (and possibly
PS/2's) to work?

I think that is enough questions for one article.  Any help would be
appreciated, especially from people who actually have had experience with any
of the above combinations.

Email reponses - if there is enough demand, I will summarise.

Duncan

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