Sun AMD V20z hardware problems
Sun Microsystems was one of the first big companies to come up with 64Bit AMD V20Z servers which quickly replaced our ancient Sparc servers. Compared to the old E220s and E420s, AMD servers were about 3 to 5 times faster depending on what we wanted it to do. The first round of V20z's we deployed saved us a lot of rack space, but the heating and power requirements were little higher than expected. Though the v20z's did reduce the footprint on the racks, the heat generated forced us to leave room on the top of the servers where the ventilation holes were placed. For all practical reasons, we couldn't use it as one U system. We ordered a second round of V20Z's a few months back and though we were prepared for the extra rack space, we stumbled upon a whole new problem this time. We noticed that some of these servers were randomly rebooting, especially at times of high activity. We were using a mirror image of the Suse distribution which we installed on the first set of se