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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Stormweaver who wrote (21631)	10/22/1999 11:04:00 AM
From: paul	Respond to of 64865

Of interest is Schwab's 3 days of downtime on their trading site - Schwab is experienced running a mission critical data center and obviously has the resources which ultimately affects downtime the most (say, unlike ebay - fast growing, no backups, few experienced employees) - I was reading about Schwab's architecture in Information Week - they are built almost entirely on IBM Mainframes and Hitachi Skyline MVS Mainframes, RS/6000 Unix Application servers and DB2, CICS databases.

To: Stormweaver who wrote (21631)	10/22/1999 11:13:00 AM
From: paul	Respond to of 64865

If i recall Ebay was trying to do an OS upgrade or operation without the appropriate Solaris Patch loaded - no backup system was in place, and this wasnt part of scheduled maintenance. in the good old days (pre internet) you did this on a test system and then migrated it to the production system when you were sure it was bulletproof - even then you had only a limited amount of users and could easily control access. Is there a standard definition for planned downtime? It seems to me that an experienced IT shop with the right equipment, architecture and experience would have a significant advantage.

To: Stormweaver who wrote (21631)	10/22/1999 10:32:00 PM
From: tiquer	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 64865

Listen dipstick... Like I said..this "downtime" has carried over from when they used Microsoft Windows NT...now it is being used to help establish the "hot backup" on Starfire... The whole point of Starfire and the hot backup is to avoid these planned and unplanned downtime episodes.. If Ebay hadn't started with a very misguided architecture using NT they wouldn't have to be going through all of this... You didn't dig far enough little man... I saw this last night and was going to put it up tonight, you almost did it for me... To support a hot backup, we needed to install new software from Sun and Veritas. It's safer to build a new system rather than layering it on top of the existing system, so we completely rebuilt eBay's database server environment on two new Starfire machines, including a new set of disks and software, in a new location. Over the past few months, we have been building this new system in close cooperation with Sun, Oracle, and Veritas. In fact, we have already completed a dress rehearsal of the switch over to the new system, and at least two more are planned before the final move to the new system. Many of you may wonder why this has taken so long. When you consider that it involved the complete installation of TWO new Sun Starfires, with all of the disks and software involved, I'm sure you'll see that it's not a simple task. In addition, we are developing new operations and administration procedures to run the new system and make it as reliable as possible for our customers. pages.ebay.com Ebay is just one of many that created big problems for themselves by starting out on Win NT... Sun and Veritas can't be blamed for Ebay's poor decisions early on in Ebay's life.. Cheers, Roger