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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems

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To: cheryl williamson who wrote (46207)	11/5/2001 3:48:30 PM
From: Bill Fischofer	Read Replies (2) of 64865

The problem with the RAS argument is that it doesn't match the realities of how technology evolves. The Internet's robustness doesn't come from a handful of armor-plated components, it comes from a distributed architecture where the failure of any component, or any group of components, has very limited impact on the whole. This is the secret of the robustness of any organic system. Armor plating is fine if you're selling tanks, but it's become increasingly archaic as a way to design computer systems. When RAID storage was first introduced it was dismissed as no real threat because after all IBM's mainframe disk drives had demonstrably superior RAS. It didn't matter. The industry quickly discovered that you could gang together a lot of "inferior" cheap disks to produce a product at dramatically lower cost that actually exhibited superior real-world performance and reliability. The same is happening today with processors. Even if you unwisely dismiss Windows XP you still have to deal with Linux clusters which promise to do to SUNW's big servers exactly what the RAID revolution did to IBM's big disk drives.

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