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GS160 CPU Problems

Just shows you how busy I am when I can't get here to update the page. Recently, I have put the first partition of the GS160 live. Compaq oops, I mean HP, have not made me very happy recently. We had been having on-and-off correctable ECC problems with the machine, and it was put down to a hierarchical switch cabling problem. Our field service engineer came in and replaced the cables but it did not seem to help the problem.

Three days before going live, we discover by chance that Compaq (can't stop saying that just as a number of years I couldn't stop saying "DEC") was aware of a problem with the 1 GHz CPUs in the machine, and that there was an ECO out to fix it. On further probing, it turned out that the problem the ECO fixes is exactly the problem we were experiencing.

Compaq got a phone call. As a matter of fact, they got multiple phone calls. Irate phone calls. Eventually, they supplied 16 731 MHz CPUs on loan until they can come up with the kits to repair our 1 GHz CPUs.

It's disappointing when your supplier appears to be deliberately keeping quiet about a problem that could potentially effect your production processing. Fortunately, when called on the problem, they responded well.