On 8/01/2014 12:05 AM, Scott Ford wrote:
I agree with Joel. PC based platforms in my experience has been very hardware
error prone, maybe due to the components. Like Joel, I haven't seen a hardware
failure in the Z/OS world since the 70s.
I've seen quite a few hardware failures on mainframes, they happen quite
frequently. They almost never cause an outage because there is
redundancy. Most of the time we didn't even know we had a failure until
IBM contacted us to let us know they had dispatched an engineer. Almost
all enterprise systems are the same, even x86. They have n+1 redundancy
for hardware components and clustering for HA. Your friendly IBM
salesman will be only too happy to talk to you about an x86 high
availability hardware/software platform.
Of course, the data center behemoths like google, facebook, amazon et
all choose to buy the cheapest bare metal commodity components with
redundancy done by the software. At that scale it's the only model that
makes economic sense.
Scott ford
www.identityforge.com
from my IPAD
On Jan 7, 2014, at 9:59 AM, David Crayford <[email protected]> wrote:
On 07/01/2014, at 6:57 AM, "Joel C. Ewing" <[email protected]> wrote:
The first step to successful diagnosing and repair of a software failure
is to be certain it IS a software issue and not some random hardware
glitch. This is made more difficult in the Intel world by the very
thing that makes these platforms affordable - a multitude of
manufacturers of motherboards, memory, hardware interface cards and
peripherals all applying their own concept of "acceptable" engineering
design while trying to make fast and cheap hardware.
Is that still the case today? Even cheap x86 blades have machine check
architecture which can signal software on hardware failures. It must be over a
decade or so since IBM started stuffing mainframe quality RAM modules into x86
servers, chipkill etc. 90% of server failures were due to RAM errors. You don't
have to search too far to find 99.999 platforms running Intel. You'll pay for
it though.
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