[staked]

I love seeing stuff like this. Though I'd be a happy man if I never had to see the words "Veritas Volume Manager" again. Definitely one of my least favorite pieces of software from that era.

I worked for a company around this same time that had servers in the NJ Exodus data center. Used to have to head up there once a month to swap out tapes in the Sun L11000.

[tyingq]

Brought back some memories for me as well. In corporate IT, unix sysadmins had to know how to manage multiple different hardware architectures and operating systems that all did things different. AIX, Solaris, HPUX, Ultrix, etc, all with different filesystems, raid hw/sw, command paths, and so on.

That picture of the ethernet hornet's nest too. Ugh. At least it wasn't AUI cabling.

[setq]

Indeed. AUI was a killer. We had a policy of turning it into 10base2 right away with an adaptor, then 10baseT when that became a thing.

I liked this era so much I used to skip dive all the kit that was chucked out. Had myself a nice stacked Sun 1000E as a desktop in 1999, until I got the electricity bill. Must have cost as much as a house when it was new.

Then I found HP/UX was horrid. Had a run in with some HP N-class systems with Oracle. Yeuch, and that turned me to open source.

[tyingq]

>>Must have cost as much as a house when it was new.

I do remember some $100k - $300k invoices for larger SMP servers from HP, Sun, and the like. For machines that probably had less overall horsepower than my current cell phone :)

[setq]

Yeah pricing was awful. I remember someone playing £12k for a single PA RISC CPU option and when they cracked it open to have a look it was 95% heatsink. Cue the "bloody expensive heatsink" comments.

It had about as much go as one of those "big slab" xeon slot CPUs at the time which was 1/10th of the cost.

[SSLy]

Well, I've seen appliances over $50k a piece ( you need at least two to be useful.) So systems like that are still here.

[tyingq]

Right, because they aren't currently commodity items. Wouldn't take much, for example, though, to get haproxy to a state where it starts eating F5 lab's lunch. A nicer ui, etc.

It took Linux and commodity servers a while to kill the $100k+/each proprietary unix server market.

[roganp]

Veritas was definitely better than the alternative. I was a dba at the time and it was a godsend.

[acveilleux]

I still can't believe a top-tier UNIX vendor required an expensive 3rd party software to have halfway decent file-system. Or in the case of HP-UX, partitioning.

I get that Veritas also did logical volume, raid and so on and that was a guenuine value added at the time. But so many box I saw had veritas so they could partition and get a file system that was OK with 36GB+ monster SCSI disks.

[drewg123]

I ran DEC Alpha servers at the same time, and Tru64 (aka OSF/1 aka DEC UNIX) shipped with AdvFS. It has a lot of the same features as ZFS (volume management combined with the FS, so you could add/remove drives, and grow/shrink capacity w/o downtime). I remember my Sun admin friends being incredulous as I shuffled disk space on a live server. It is kind of a shame HP killed it.

[mitchty]

From having to use it on solaris, it was more the flexibility of resizing and changing the layout without downtime that was useful.

When you have a 100k+ machine it makes more sense, when you can just rebuild a new instance it makes less sense. I do NOT miss using it, but it was nice for its niche.