Sun Microsystems StorEdge S1

Firing up a Sun Microsystems StorEdge S1 three disk SCSI array from 2001. We'll take a look at the hardware, get a quick SCSI primer, and pair the StorEdge with a SunFire v120. Then we'll setup a RAID0 array across two SCSI drives using Sun Volume Manager.

Music by Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio

#sun #raid #retro #retrotech #scsi

Rack stuff

Video gear

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[nezu_cc]

That Pi on the floor begging for help is so real. And when you need one they magically disappear.

[markjstradling]

As an old time Sun Systems Admin, those S1 arrays give me a bit of a nervous twitch. It’s single attach, so if a disk failed you’d very occasionally get a SCSI bus reset, which would take the whole array down for a second.

So you needed two, with two scsi cards in the server and mirror across the arrays.

Which, given the were so expensive, that was hard to get the user to understand. Until their server crashed

[realifejon]

Man, it's always a good day when Claberto uploads lol

[ProjectGeek]

In the mid 2000s I had about 20 Sunfire V100s in my home office. I love the look of this gen of Sun.

[BestSpatula]

Sun was a phenomenal company absolutely packed with a very broad range of engineering talent, and management that was visionary. Sun had an absolutely massive role in building the Internet. And then they got eaten by a boring company with a larger legal department than engineering. Kudos for showing off one of their UltraSPARC systems. I'd never seen this storage enclosure.

[alc]

I love that the foam even has a faux spindle on the bottom.

[__delucks__]

Great video!! I wanted to add that not only is the Openboot PROM implemented in forth, the "ok" prompt is effectively a forth REPL for the full environment! You can define new functions in there, modify the existing functions loaded from the read only memory, and pretty much do whatever you want with the hardware of the machine. People have implemented additional diagnostic tools in forth that are meant to be loaded from the network inside of OBP which is super cool.

[laialbert]

This brings back some fond memories. I was a Sun & Linux sysadmin and oversaw the software for a 72 Ultra 10 workstation lab. The Sun stuff was so reliable compared to Linux in those days, though at times seemed very obscure. I still miss how overly engineered they were. You could throw completely ridiculous workloads with hundreds of simultaneous users and they might slow to a crawl, but simply would not crash. Keep these videos coming!

[thestarscape]

I do not work in network engineering, i was born in 2003 and most of the hardware and standards you work with predate me even being an idea and somehow, you are still so dreadfully interesting. keep up the good work!

[crazychatting]

the console thing and setup was great! please more of it! you could really see where ZFS was born :D

[Ronnocbot]

The sun systems are always very fascinating. Thanks for the vodeo

[CybrixTheProot]

With all this sun stuff you might need to get a sun server rack

[Mortryxx]

Always want Sun videos. I was a Solaris SysAdmin instructor for 20 years starting on Solaris 2.4 through to the end, Solaris 11. Early days we hosted classes on Sparcstation5’s. Toward the end I had built out a rack of 8 V240 servers paired into clustered configurations for SunCluster training. I wept at the end when Oracle bought and ravaged the amazing company. Thanks for another great one!

[OzeCovers]

I see Sun stuff, I click. Simple. Great video clab

[luis]

New Sun Microsystems hardware content at last!
I worked with those storage arrays back in the day.
SCSI powa!
Thank you very much

[MatthewHill]

Man, that is a massive unit considering it carries only three drives and zero compute!

[jj-gr]

The forth rom monitor is not just about the implementation language, but you can also program it in forth. This could be used for things like testing or configuring third-party bus components although I don't really know how much this was ever done. I worked at Sun (starting as a then very junior sw eng) for just under ten years and never saw it done, other than to show it could be done.

[keyboard_g]

So much hardware for 3 drives amazing. Just a few years later they would have systems with a dozen or more.

[squili]

these sun servers are so fascinating! i love how much stuff they were able to pack in these things

[chrisis]

I'll take as much Sun content as you are willing to make. I'm also interested in seeing how your in home cable setup is going? Thank you for the content.