Re: Back to the future?

[Lukas Beeler <lukas.beeler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 05:27, Larry Bolhuis <midrange@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Essentially they are doing what IBM did to the AS/400 and iSeries machines for many years. From the C models through the 5074 towers and 7xx server batteries lived in the bottom and kept the machines running through short power outages. Maybe in this light IBM will rethink the removal of on-board batteries??

Not really - this is a scale-out thing with commodity servers.

The reliability that can be achieved with such setups is a lot lower
than it is with a server that has two mains supplies, both protected
by a different UPS and backup generators. But this does not matter,
since all the reliability stuff is done on a software level - downed
machine does not matter for Facebook or Google.

Many unreliable machines made reliable by software. It's also
important that for Facebook, some data loss may be acceptable - a 1000
status message updates of users lost are not a big thing.

Most IBM i shops have a single (or two) machines, with highly reliable
and redundant hardware, where machine failure is definitively not a
daily occurrence. A failed machine is a big thing.