http://www.panix.com/panix/hardware.html (PC Press Internet CD, 03/1996)

- Hardware

Section Update: Sat Feb 25 08:24:53 EST 1995

Panix machines

All Panix users have an account on one of our Sparc-10s. One Sparc10 is a 4- way multiprocessor using Ross 66MHz CPUs and 128MB RAM. The other two are 10/40s with 80MB RAM. They share 16GB on six fast SCSI-2 disks. We also have a Sparc-2 which acts as our news, mail, domain, gopher, and FTP server. It has 32MB RAM and about 5GB of disk space. We also have another Sparc-2 with 32MB RAM and a 2.5GB drive which is used as our "secure" server. All of these machines are networked together via two Ethernets, with the second exclusively devoted to NFS traffic between the machines. There are several other machines that run specific services.

New York City Facility

245 modems:
- 45 Hayes 2400bps modems.
- 150 ZyXEL or AT&T V.32bis (14,400bps) modems
- 50 Hayes V.FC and V.34 (28,800bps) modems.
- All Panix modems support MNP, V.42 and V.42bis.
4 Annex-3 terminal servers on our Ethernet.

Nassau County Facility

32 modems:
- 24 ZyXel V.32bis (14,400bps) modems
- 8 Hayes V.FC (28,800bps) modems. The Hayes modems will be upgraded to V.34 shortly.
All modems are connected to an Annex-3 terminal server.
Eight more 14.4-modems and eight more 28.8 lines are on order.

Jersey City, New Jersey Facility

24 modems:
- 16 US Robotics 14.4 modems
- 8 US Robotics 28.8 modems
All modems are connected to an Annex-3 terminal server.

Western Suffolk County Facility

25 modems:
- 17 AT&T 14.4 modems
- 8 USR 28.8 modems
All modems are connected to an Annex-3 terminal server.

Routers

Our Internet connection comes into our NYC hub router, a Cisco AGS+/4. Our New Jersey and Long Island connections, also on full T1 circuits, go through other Ciscos, back to New York, to the same Cisco AGS+4 router that our Internet connection comes into.

Backups

Our backups run on an automated schedule to multiple 4G DAT tape drives.

Operating System(s)

Our Sparcs all run SunOS 4.1.3. They are Axil Workstations, identical in all respects to Sun Sparcstation 10 or Sparc-2 machines.

One point we'd like to make about our hardware: Panix could not be as good as it is if we didn't have truly reliable hardware to run on. We've had absolutely perfect results from the Axil workstations and recommend them to anyone looking for a Sparc. Also, we've been delighted by the superb performance of the two Ross HyperSPARC 2-CPU modules which are the heart of Panix's main machine. In the many months since we installed it, it has caused not a single crash or other problem, and we recommend it at least as highly as the Axil Sparcstation we run it in.