Experiences with 4D/2xx as timesharing systems?

[Rod Paul]

At work we've been running 3 of the 4D series machines for just over a year
now, our current configuration is:

	2 4D/70G's 8M ram   2x380Mb drives
	1 CS12     16M ram  1.2 gig drive   serial-port-adapter	  9-track

Also on our net is an Abekas A60 (don't do graphics without one).

We're gunna receive a personal next week, and upgrade all machines to 16M ram
(NeWS is quite a hog)...

The only bitch we've ever realy had with SGI has been the gen-lock boards not
putting out REAL broadcast quality, thus the Abekas.

Our CS12 has been rebuilt 1.5 times, kind of a bitch, but SGI have allways
been real good about support, and the most down time we've ever had is
about 4 days.

We do a lot of 3D computer animation on these machines using Wavedick, sorry
Wavefront, software. There are never more than about 4 users on the server
at once, but it exports via NFS to the other machines and is accessed 
constantly.

Our future plans will be to upgrade to 240's as servers and slap personals
on them (if we find the personals reliable).

In general I'm very happy with SGI, their libraries and the direction they're
going with networks, i.e. distributed graphics library (DGL).

I've found both the hotline and local service guy's very responsive and have
even received the ocasional call from out west asking how things are going.

Compared to the nightmares I've heard about SUN, APPOLO and DEC regarding
servicing, SGI blows them away.

Peripherals? Sure they're expensive, but I don't have to spend time dicking
with drivers and finding out the hard way how well some product integrates.
Let SGI do it first, and pay them for it. Also if it screws up, they'll
replace it, probably quite fast.

Guess I'm sounding like a sales guy, but of all the machines I've worked on
in the past seven years, SGI are going in a decent direction, at least where
computers and graphics are concerned (allthough I'm not sold on NeWS yet).

Cheers,

Rod.
-- 
Rodian Paul				|
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