Got a little busy last week, but wanted to extend a very happy 4th birthday to the Sun System Handbook as of December 15!

Here are some highlights in Handbook history:

• Initial internal & partner version release: 12/15/00
• Initial customer version release date: 11/01/01
• Lifetime page views (December 15, 2000 - November 30, 2004): 97,638,687 !!!

The Handbook should achieve 100 million lifetime page views by the end of December or very early in January 2005 !!

Congratulations to all of those who have worked on and been involved with this project during the last 4 years.

Do you know of the best way of performing RAID with Sun hardware?

I've got a buddy who is looking for a way to have duplicated data for his workstations, possibly using RAID 1 for mirroring so that each drive is standalone and able to be bootable without all the other drives attached that may use parity.

For Hardware solutions, I pointed him to:
A PCI RAID card for e250's and e450's (part number X6542A).
The A3500 which is a separate unit with a RAID controller built in.
The A1000 is an all in one disk and RAID controller solution.

On the software side:
Disksuite (included w/solaris)
Veritas / Sun Enterprise Volume Manager

Training:
Sun Hardware RAID Storage Systems Administration
http://suned.sun.com/US/catalog/courses/ES-255.html

As always, for system specific information, I'd check out: http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub/Systems/

and if all else fails, http://supportforum.sun.com.

Any experts with RAID using Sun Hardware have any tips?

ongoing has already mentioned David Edmundson's project, but I must say this is the most interesting use of an E450 I have ever seen!

Glad to see he's using the Sun System Handbook E450 page if he runs into any problems, though we don't describe this particular type of environment or use.

Next, perhaps David should look at building a shock-absorbing rack mount, and a Sun Fire B1600 Blade System Chassis for expandability, hot-swapping, and more cargo space!

As boston pointed out, the E2900 midrange server, and E20K and E25K high end server Handbook pages have now been released on the Sun System Handbook!

Pretty amazing that all of this information is painstakingly gathered and published by a team of three (overworked, underpaid and underacknowledged) knowledge engineers...

Got the title quote from a colleague of mine, and have adopted it in my .signature:

Knowledge is power. Sharing is empowerment.
http://sunsolve.Sun.COM/handbook_pub/

You should really check out the Sun System Handbook, if you've never seen it before. It's THE tool for field engineers, sysadmins, and Sun Hardware geeks.

The team that works on it is really top-notch, and have been working on Sun Hardware for at least 15 years! I am very priviledged to help these guys by trying to automate parts of the Handbook (Full Components List, Service Views, and more).

Historically, there have been only 3 guys creating the content for the Handbook manually in HTML. There are 3 others, including myself, that are bringing XML to the Handbook for automation.

Philosophically, I completely believe that sharing knowledge is a very good thing. That's also why Sun has started blogs.sun.com! If you know anyone working on Sun hardware, please point them to the Handbook!