James wrote:
The $ required to implement a fault resilient network are very high. You need to duplicate cable, routers, bridges, and back end iron (and its' services). Not a trivial task and not a cheap task.
PC's are more sensible since they are autonomous; people can be productive regardless of network and back-end chaos that may be-fall the company.
James, it's interesting that you brought up the cost of implementing a fault tolerant network. While the cost is high, but the reliability it provides warrants the cost.
If you think the PC can be productive because it's autonomous, then, I think you are on smoke. For example, my company is using multiple replicated servers to support our E-Commerce site. With the volume of transactions, amount of database access, we just can't run this on PCs. We need the "Big Irons" as you like to call it. It's expensive, but comparing to the $ we would lose if we only have 1 single server and the server goes down, the cost is minimal.
I don't know how NT does it, but our E-Commerce site use UNIX. and if one machine goes down, all we have to do is to write a smart program to detect it, then, we use a UNIX command ifconfig to enable the IP address of the dead machine to a replicated server and also replicate its service as well. ifconfig will cause ARP messages to be broadcasted to the gateway routers or switch to re-cache our IP. The whole process is automated, seemless and transparent to the users. In this environment, we allow remote users to run apps using Citrix's WinFrame on our servers. The remote users can practically run MS word from their IE or Netscape browsers, instead of running a huge memory hog Office 97 on their local machine. The performance is great, the traffic on the network is minimal. I suggest you go to citrix's web page and read their whitepaper on how this works.
Basically, we just have dump terminals, all our company's apps are residing on the server. We are a 100% server centric company. That's why I don't shell out a shit-load amount of dollars to feed the MSFT fat cats. Even the office software are from Staroffice. Our goal is to become MSFT product free by 2000. Even our company is in downtown Seattle, we just HATE MSFT. We are a bunch of Linux freaks who just don't believe in paying MSFT. |
