Those are all excellent suggestions.

While, at this point, I do think that blaming the hardware is a bit of a red herring (the software still has to work, albeit it might work very slowly) on a slow system, you should not have data corruption. There are other reasons to blame the hardware, but I doubt if it's the cause of the data corruption as long as you have working disks and enough swap space configured .. of course, on the other hand, you really don't want to use swap that much, so you do need to have enough memory.

I'd be interested in knowing what the configuration is (prtconf -vp output) and what sorts of numbers you're seeing with 'vmstat 5' and 'iostat 5'.

I can ask around about the NCA thing if it becomes interesting.

-David