OT, Reliability, Availability, Serviceability -
Clearly EMC is the big dog in this area. More and more, computers are becoming storage and networks that happen to have computers attached rather than vice-versa. EMC is so far ahead of the competition on the software, and it looks like they are doing interesting and intelligent (and since I am long, I hope, profitable!) things with the Intel Architecture and NUMA knowledge they collected in the Data General acquisition. JMHO.
Regards,
Doug
It took IBM years with their big iron, but RAS is right up there now, in priority, with performance and price. Sun is in the tent now, also, and Intel is making a lot of noise about RAS in their chip and infrastructure designs for both IA32 and IA64. They, and their more systems design oriented boxmaker partners, like IBM and Compaq, are getting there fast, on the Intel based stuff. The E-Commerce companies will get there someday. OTOH, how can an ebay or an Amazon not be there now? Their entire business depends on their servers staying up. (I think ebay is doing it now, the aftermath of all the publicity on their outages made it pretty clear they're trying), don't know about Amazon. The ISPs will for sure take longer. |
