On 03/27 02:49 , Les Mikesell wrote:
> I find complete-system redundancy with commodity boxes to be cheaper and 
> more efficient than using military strength parts that cost 10x as much 
> and fail half as often.  

That's Google's solution, and it works for them. Nothing fancy... rebooting
servers means a dude with a broomstick walking around pushing power buttons.

> The real killer is the time planning out the replacement operation so 
> the only time wasted is the one person who does the work.  In the 
> whole-system scenario where the systems are load balanced anyway, 
> yanking a machine out isn't anything special and you don't even need the 
> hot-swap drive case.

it's a nice ideal circumstance. :)
In practice I've found that clustering systems often increases
administrative headaches exponentially. There's a lot more that *can* go
wrong and therefore *does* go wrong with a cluster. There's a place for
them, like everything else... but they are far from a panacea.

> In practice I don't see any relationship between price and reliability. 
>   I'm inclined to think that they all come off the same production line 
> these days.

some are still better than others... how much better, I don't know. I've
seen some really expensive hardware go belly-up at times too.

Here's what I did with some of the aforementioned bad & expensive hardware:
http://www.redchrome.org/shooting_computers/shooting_computers_index.html
(the Sparc 10, specifically)

-- 
Carl Soderstrom
Systems Administrator
Real-Time Enterprises
www.real-time.com

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