UX400S product backgrounder

["Kenneth H. Sinclair" <khs@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.SYMBOLICS.COM>]

    Date: Thu, 10 Aug 89 15:08 CDT
    From: dmitchell@backus.trc.amoco.com (Donald H. Mitchell)

    I would like to buy a couple of these new boards; however, it does not
    seem clear what they are indeed compatible with.  I should say that I'm
    trying to work with my sales rep and his technical sales support on this
    question.

    In particular, my deskside 4/110s (three of them) each have an extra 9U
    VME bus slot.   I can buy SCSI disks and tapes for these if necessary;
    however, I would love to avoid it and have the Symbolics page over
    Ethernet (I know about speed problems).

This works fine, but you wouldn't love it if you'd tried it.

					     Symbolics, however, does not
    have 4/110's in its shop; so, they are reluctant to sell boards for
    them.  My questions to the net are how many others would be interested
    in 4/110 support? Does anyone see a compelling reason for a local drive
    and tape?  Should there be a technical reason the 4/110 won't work?

I believe the UX400 will work in a 4/110, and indeed we expect to
qualify the UX400 for the majority of Sun's workstation products.
However, this will take time and money, and we do not want to support
configurations we haven't tested ourselves first.  Talk to your sales
representative about any configurations that are particularly important
to you, and we'll get the message.

    I also have a SparcServer 390 on order for which I will not have a
    workstation terminal (just a RS232 dumb terminal and lots of file
    service clients running X).  This fine beast has 2 GigaBytes of disk and
    a tape drive; so, it passes those requirements.  However, because it
    does not have an X terminal directly attached, I'm not certain it will
    work for an embed board.  The Symbolics board would have to have
    something in its FEP telling it that its X device was whatever server I
    choose (statically or dynamically).  Does anyone see a reason this use
    of a remote X server wouldn't work (since X by definition supports
    remote)?

This works fine.  Genera is a demanding but well behaved X client, and
should work with most X servers.

	      Does anyone see why you couldn't put more than one Symbolics
    board into this type of machine (it has somewhere between 9 and 13 9U
    VME bus slots available)?

The UX400 `device driver' doesn't support this yet, but we intend to in
the future.  Performance will degrade as more boards are plugged in; I
wouldn't count on filling the card cage with UX400s, but I imagine a
high end Sun could support at least two or three.