Paul, re that Stratus machine:
Until now, the 1,100-employee, Maynard, Mass.-based company has used Hewlett-Packard's PA-RISC chips in systems that ran either the HP-UX version of Unix or Stratus' VOS operating system.
Sounds like as much a vote of confidence for Microsoft as for Intel. Stratus has been making ultra high reliability machines for years, like Tandem. This is the first I can remember of that type that uses Microsoft. First time for Intel also, I guess, of the "6, 7 or 8 nines" of availability kind of a machine . As for AMD, if half the rumors of Athlon crashes are true, a system based on them would probably get you about a 1/2 a nine...during a good week. Well, it might be the infrastructure around Athlon that's the problem a lot of the time, but still, you're only as strong as your weakest link.
The ftServer 5200 is a four-processor machine, though double- and triple-redundant components mean it's actually built with eight or 12 CPUs. The system uses Intel's latest server chip, the "Foster" Xeon model based on the Pentium 4 design.
Sounds like it might use a voting algorithm.
Tony |
