PCI DSSI adapters; was [Re: FA: DEC RF-71 Disk Drive]

[Dan Williams]

On 18/03/06, Patrick Finnegan <pat at computer-refuge.org> wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 18, 2006 at 10:53:24AM -0800, Zane H. Healy wrote:
> > At 11:12 AM -0500 3/18/06, Patrick Finnegan wrote:
> > >On Sat, Mar 18, 2006 at 03:41:57AM -0500, 9000 VAX wrote:
> > >> On 3/18/06, Wai-Sun Chia <waisun.chia at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >> >
> > >> > So this is an official DEC product? KFPSA?
> > >> > Which modern PC-based *nix does this work on? Linux, *BSD?
> > >>
> > >>
> > >>
> > >> They were made for Alpha computers, which use PCI bus, I believe.
> > >
> > >Of course, they're PCI, that's right in the subject.  But what
> > >OS has drivers for these things?
> > >
> > >I guess VMS probably does, and maybe Tru64... anything else?
> >
> > I'm guessing that the only other OS that *might* support them would
> > be NetBSD, though that seems a little doubtful.
> >
> > I think this is the first I've ever heard of a PCI DSSI controller,
> > and I'm a little surprised that such a thing exists.  The other
> > odd-ball one would be the PCI CI controller, the thing is, that a CI
> > controller makes far more sense.  All DSSI talks to is a few hard
> > drives, and tape drives.  I don't think it can be used as a cluster
> > interface (if it did the controller would make sense), so why bother.
>
> Sure it was, or at least the installation manuals Digital had for
> MicroVAXes with DSSI described how to cluster pairs of VAXes with it,
> either for the MicroVAX 3x00 QBUS machines that had DSSI on their CPU
> board, or VAX 4000/[2-7]00's
>
> Pat
> --
> Purdue University ITAP/RCAC       --- http://www.rcac.purdue.edu/
> The Computer Refuge               --- http://computer-refuge.org
>

I have had two Vax 4000's clustered with dssi, they can also share
drives a lot quicker this way. I would guess that the pci dssi was for
people that where upgrading machines and didn't want to invest in
upgrading drives as well.

Dan