[snip] Reliability is only one part of the equation. [snip] Good points, however I was responding to the idea that running a simple app on a single box somehow proves that the server boxes are now on par with mainframe reliablility, and that's not a logical comparison.
[snip] > A mainframe is a different beast, offering many, many diverse > applications to thousands of users all on one box. Well occasionally that's true. [snip] Not in my experience. It has always been true in every shop I've worked in. [snip] > I've yet to see unix or windows accomplish the same thing. See Ron Hawkins' last post on this. If you're running modern disk hardware you're running a fault-tolerant unix application [snip] Again, you can't compare a single purpose application (such as a disk array), with a mainframe. Sure, some subsystems are supported by cheap chips or os/s, but they are doing a very simple job: exactly what these things should be used for. [snip] > You have to compare apples to apples when talking about reliability. Rubbish. Reliability is a "nice to have" feature that costs a ton of engineering dollars. [snip] I'm not sure where you've been working, but if I told the company president here that reliabliltiy was "nice to have" I'd be out on the street before I could blink. IBM didn't invent RAS systems to keep themselves amused, they did so because their customers demanded it, and were willing to pay for it. Both IBM and their customers had to invest heavily in this or they'd be out of business. I'm not going to get into chest thumping over mainframes, this issue has been beaten to death. All I'm saying is that today's mainframes, technically, are still ahead in terms of ras when you consider all they are able to take on and the number of concurrent users they are able to support. The day that it becomes commonplace for, say, three unix servers to be able to support the entire IT production environment for a large company, and do so reliably, I'll concede the point. Robin Murray Tel: (902) 453-7300 x4177 Cell: (902) 430-0637 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
