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From: carl@CITHEX.CALTECH.EDU (Carl J Lydick)
Newsgroups: comp.os.vms
Subject: Re: Local-Area VAXclustering.
Message-ID: <870721165101.01q@CitHex.Caltech.Edu>
Date: Tue, 21-Jul-87 20:00:01 EDT
Article-I.D.: CitHex.870721165101.01q
Posted: Tue Jul 21 20:00:01 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 24-Jul-87 07:03:17 EDT
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 >   	We here at the University of Rhode Island are trying to review our
 >   options for increasing the overall performance of our VAX 11/780.  One
 >   idea brought up was to LAV the 780 to multiple uVAX IIs.  What exactly
 >   does this buy us? Can we set up terminal servers to share the 780 and
 >   uVAXs just as we would for a normal cluster of 780s?  Can we share disks
 >   and have one common SYSUAF.DAT?  We've got three RM05s and one RA81 that
 >   we'd like to share across systems.

The current configuration of the 780 was (apparently) not specified (I haven't
seen the original posting yet; just Jerry Leichter's response).  Here in
high energy physics at Caltech, we faced a similar problem: our 780 running
VMS had about the same responsiveness you'd expect from a 750 running UNIX
(i.e., occasional 30-second waits for the $ prompt in response to a carriage
return at the DCL level, two-minute or greater delays executing a simple
login.com, and so forth).  We found the real problem to be that since we
acquired the VAX in the late 70's, VMS had grown substantially, but our
780 hadn't.  A memory upgrade from 4 MB to 16 MB (8 would have been enough,
but we managed to get two companies to bid against each other and got 16
for the price originally quoted for 8) roughly doubled throughput! :-)