On Tue, 25 Mar 2008 09:17:55 -0400, "Jarkko Hietaniemi" <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 8:40 AM, Steffan Davies <[email protected]> wrote: > > Jarkko Hietaniemi <[email protected]> wrote at 08:06 on 2008-03-25: > > > > > Indeed. I've seen UNIX servers with 1+ year uptime, but sooner or later > > > either a disk crash or a need to patch something urgent brings them down > > > either by accident or by necessity. VMS takes uptime rather seriously. > > > (I don't know for certain but I assume that one can patch a cluster one > > > node at a time so that the services of the cluster remain available.) > > > > Same applies to a cluster of any OS, surely? (With dishonourable exceptions > > Possibly. Though from what I've seen UNIX clusters are never quite as > robust as VMS. > > AIX, though yucky in many other respects, has some neat features even > when not clustered: more than ten years ago it was capable of > migrating the boot device / operating system to a new larger hard > drive while the system was live, no RAID involved. Same here. However I hate IBM and AIX, they certainly gained some credits in this area. No downtime at all, even if that system was unused (who's surprised all our employees prefer the HP-UX boxes over the AIX machines) and could easily have been restarted, the unmirrored disk was replaced in less than 2 hours without any process complaining. Installing the new C compiler however somehow required a reboot. Confused where IBM puts their priorities > > for such things as Exchange in which clustering seems to consist of a set > > of mechanisms by which the failure of a single machine can bring about the > > demise of its peers). -- H.Merijn Brand Amsterdam Perl Mongers (http://amsterdam.pm.org/) using & porting perl 5.6.2, 5.8.x, 5.10.x on HP-UX 10.20, 11.00, 11.11, & 11.23, SuSE 10.1 & 10.2, AIX 5.2, and Cygwin. http://qa.perl.org http://mirrors.develooper.com/hpux/ http://www.test-smoke.org http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/stupid-disclaimers/
