John,
There is an article in today's WSJ (I get the hard copy, if anyone can cut and paste from the on line edition that would be great), titled "IBM to Sell Servers Using Intel's Foster, Starting Next Month".
I see that Duke posted the article. Couple of comments about it, around this part of the article:
IBM is making "an aggressive attempt to push mainframe design into the Intel world," said Jonathan Eunice, an analyst with Illuminata, a market research firm in Nashua, N.H. He said IBM designed the system so that it will keep running even after some parts are unplugged.
This is all about availability which is expressed as a measure of the percentage of time in a year a machine is available, or up and running. The term "nines" is used, where five nines means you're up 99.999% of the time. Machines like the no-down Compaq/Tandem ones get up to eight nines or something as essentially everything is redundant in them. Lower end Intel servers today, and Suns before they fixed their ECC problem, are down in the lower number of nines. Non-availability includes time the machine is down not only for repair, but also for upgrades or microcode patches which the server vendor recommends. So, the mainframe is most known for highest availability and IBM is making a statement by saying they're trying to take Intel based machines into that class. Some features that get you to five or better nines, besides just highly reliable chips, boards, software, etc., are hot pluggable or replaceable parts, maybe even including CPUs, and dynamic repartitioning to keep a machine running even if a failure occurs. This can even be unseen by the customer. Ability to power up and down separate portions of the machine to repair or upgrade without taking the whole machine down is another feature IBM is probably doing.
Bottom line is it sounds like IBM is the first OEM to be placing features that only high end machines traditionally use, into Intel based machines, to elevate them up toward that high end class. Couldn't ask for a better one than IBM. They invented the term RAS and a lot of the features that go into it.
Tony |
