> If the machines are important enough, there should be someone on-site > 24/7. If the company is too cheap to hire adequate staffing to be > on-hand for critical systems (we used to call this a "NOC", back when > companies hired clueful people), then remote console access is a > reasonable substitute.
I'd say the jury is still out on this one. There are cost benefits to both solutions. Obviously it's always nice to have a human on site, but I've worked with DCs that didn't have anyone capable of doing anything more than changing a tape and with RSC and ALOMs, I never needed anyone. If a piece of hardware broke, Sun kindly sent someone out to fix it. I gave them the rack location and unit number, they called me when the wrench light no longer illuminated. What more did I need? > Console access should be simple, bulletproof, secure, and absolutely > reliable...and for that, a good old-fashioned terminal simply can't be > beat. Perhaps. But tell me, I've worked in DCs that had 900 Sparc boxes. It certainly wasn't feasible to have 900 ASCII terminals sucking power and space. I'll take the so called complexity of an RSC or ALOM any day. I can remotely power cycle a system with them, can't do that with an ASCII terminal. I've yet to have an ALOM or RSC fail on me, and I've worked with thousands of them. > Even simple systems like RSC increase the number of chips, and > the number of lines of code, between your eyes and a root shell prompt > by many orders of magnitude. That sort of complexity is the LAST thing > someone needs when trying to troubleshoot a failed critical system. > > I mean no disrespect, but I suspect you may have been infected by the > cult of "it's been around awhile therefore it's automatically > obsolete", also known as "if it's old, it's bad, and if it's not new, > it's old." :-( I mean no disrespect either, but you sound like an old dog who needs to learn some new tricks. Just because something is "NEW" and more complex doesn't make it bad. My Pentium 4 has many millions more transistors than my 4Mhz 8088 did, and I've had far fewer problems with it than I did my first IBM PC. My hard drives now hold gigabytes instead of megabytes, but last for years instead of months. As complexity has increased, reliability has increased as well. > *laugh* Interesting, I have remote console access for my unmanned > sites, but you'd better believe the first person who takes the ASCII > terminals out of those rooms will be looking for a job the next day. And anyone who came to interview for one of my job openings who suggested we use ASCII terminals would be thanked for his time and resume thrown in the trash before s/he could get his car started. > And let's not get me started on dumpstering functional equipment in > general, as about $200 of my "selling stuff in my spare time" money > last month was made by selling used ASCII terminals. =) > > My original point, however, is that servers in a datacenter are a > very bad place for graphical consoles. Is my opinion on this matter > commonly held? Nope. Do people laugh at me for it? Yes, on occasion. > Do the companies I work for clamor all over themselves for the uptime > stats that I deliver to their production groups? Yup. We're not talking about graphics terminals. Just more reliable and efficient ways of accessing consoles using modern day methods that provide more control over the server it's talking to. An RSC or ALOM is hardly graphical. Ever read Jonathan Schwartz's blog? I work in data centers similar to the ones he discusses with power/space/cooling problems. We shuttled dozens of functioning Enterprise class servers out the door for smaller space/lower power systems. Are you going to tell me that was a bad thing now? _______________________________________________ SunRay-Users mailing list [email protected] http://www.filibeto.org/mailman/listinfo/sunray-users
