On Wed, 2002-07-10 at 00:15, Richard Ford wrote: > High availability for SME's? Is this not seriously missing the mark on the > intended market segment? This is a 2x increase in costs where most SME's to > start with are hard pressed to pay for SCSI hardware raid and SCSI DAT/ETC > backup, ECC ram, etc.
Sorta. Most of the customers I've seen so far don't go and shell out on any new hardware. They just use whatever junk is lying around which (a) is hardware that has already been paid for and/or depreciated, and so essentially free, and (b) very prone to failure. Doubling the cost of the hardware (twice nothing is nothing) isn't a big problem. I've got two quite small companies that are wanting high availability. One needs it because down-time costs them a lot; the other doesn't have anyone on site to fix anything -- the nearest technical person is several hours away. The former is relatively easy to fix -- they have two identical computers, one with removable hard disks, the other without. If something (hardware-wise) goes wrong they just put the disks into the other one. The latter is harder, (and I haven't done anything with them yet) and I'll probably end up using this How-To: http://www.e-smith.org/docs/howto/contrib/SME_High_Availability_How-To.htm Which shows that there's other people out there wanting high availability SME servers. > Nice idea, but incorrect market, I would assume that most SME's would want > reliability and integrity before availability - which is a VERY big > umbrella. > > It's not like the SME server is used by FIFA.org, Olympics.com and the > international currency and futures traders? No, but a busy store (customer 1 above) loses a lot of money for every minute their computers are off-line. They actually did go and buy high quality hardware, etc. etc. but that's still not enough. I think they would have much preferred something automatic rather than manually moving disks around. > The marginal value to them would be lower than the price > of acquiring it. > Not always. It's not like I'm asking the Mitel people to go and write a h-a system. I'm just asking them for two lines of code that creates a hook to hang one on. If it never gets used, well, it's not a vast amount of R&D that has been wasted. > > > 2) I haven't asked Hsing Foo Wang about this, but it would be > > > nice to have some hooks for better integrating high availability. > > > I was thinking something like a hook like > > > if (-f /etc/ha-esmith/haconsole.pm) { > > > require 'haconsole.pm'; haconsole::do_hook(); > > > } > > > somewhere around line 723 of /sbin/e-smith/console (where is asks for > > > server/gateway/both mode). > > > > > > This would make it easier to have "smart" high availability, > > > where it just asks for the IP address and root password for the > > > other high availability server, and then works out all the > > > remaining parameters (and sets up high availability automatically). > > > > > > > > > -------------- > > > > > > Anyone have any thoughts or comments? > > > > > > > > >
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