RE: RAID Cache Battery Source

We buy Wintel servers with a 3 year, 4 hour response warranty. After
the warranty expires, so does the server. It sounds expensive to do a 3
year cycle but if you consider the out-of-warranty expense of repairs
plus the cost of downtime buying a new server is cheap. Besides,
computing requirements grow and newer Wintel servers always - always -
offer better bang per buck. And now that we're moving more and more
work to VMWare, we can use VMotion to migrate workloads from server to
server, potentially without even rebooting them.

Rob, consider VMWare ESX and some of it's advanced tools as a potential
alternative to MIMIX-like capabilities for Windows. There's some
sophisticated stuff going on in the x86 virtualization space. We are,
for instance, going to set up a Dell NAS unit with a pair of x86 servers
connected via iSCSI (it would have been the System i as a data store but
IBM doesn't support non-System x x86 severs). The x86 servers will run
VMWare ESX and we'll put about 6 to 8 Windows Server installs on one box
and essentially let them fail over (using VMotion) to the other should
the first box go down. This is within one data center so we'll
occasionally snap-shot the VM images to send them over the wire to the
remote HA server cluster.


I would never work for a company that valued it's data so little that it
wouldn't keep production servers under hardware, OS, and ISV application
maintenance. Development environments, fine, but production should
always be insured by warranty or maintenance contracts.