Sam Knight wrote:

> Does anyone have information on or know where I can obtain information on a
> Jamaica box?  I assume this is an expansion cabinet possibly with a power
> supply for disk drives.

The Jamaica box is installed in an expansion cabinet, it's not the
cabinet itself, although you can buy a cabinet w/Jamaica box
pre-installed.

A Jamaica box is the common name for the HP A3311A deskside (i.e.
w/cabinet), HP A3312A field rackmount, or HP A3312AZ factory rackmount
high availability storage systems (or HASS for short). The term "field
rackmount" means the Jamaica box comes empty with no drives in it,
whereas "factory rackmount" means when you get it the drives are already
in it. You need to be at least at MPE 5.0 Express 3 to use one. The
"deskside" model comes already installed in a 1.1-meter cabinet. They
feature redundant power supplies and fans, hence the "high availability"
tag.

We usually buy A3312A's and stick them in a 1.6- or 2-meter cabinet,
then load them up with 8 half-height 4 GB drives. (You can also put 9 GB
drives in them, but we haven't bought any of those.) They support
single-ended or fast/wide differential disk modules or SE DDS tape
modules. They are hot-pluggable, meaning if you need to replace a
mirrored disk that died, you can pop the disk module out and pop in a
new one without a system reboot. In fact, the power supply and fan
modules are also hot-pluggable, making repair and maintenance that much
easier.

You can also install a Jamaica box, configure all 8 ldevs in it, then
after you bring the system up you can add the disk modules as you need
them, knowing they're already configured on the system. The volume mount
message comes up on the console and you're ready to rock and roll!

Most of this info came from the product overview in the Jamaica box's
installation manual. I have a few extra copies sitting around if anyone
wants them; HP includes one each time we get a new Jamaica box.

We usually buy two Jamaica boxes at a time so we can keep our mirrored
disk pairs in separate cabinets. This provides an extra measure of
redundancy; if one whole cabinet fails (yes, in a busy data center this
does happen!) you still have the other half of the mirrored pair(s)
safely ensconced in another cabinet.

> Our CE said this item would be necessary to install additional disk drives
> in our HP3000/957RX.

Don't know if "necessary" is true or not, but if it supports a HASS
(Jamaica) box, it's one of the better ways to go, IMO.

HTH,
Patrick
--
Patrick Santucci
Technical Services Systems Programmer
KVI, a division of Seabury & Smith
Visit our site! http://www.kvi-ins.com
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