Messages in this thread | | | From | "Chris Smith" <> | Subject | Re: fsck is dead (was: Some very thought-provoking ...) | Date | Sun, 27 Jun 1999 18:21:02 -0500 |
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> 1 ~30 minute reboot a week is 99.9% uptime, which is what NT hardware > vendors promise w/ >100k/yr support contracts.. So aparently 33minutes > should be perfectly acceptiable to enterprises.
Depends on how you define "enterprise". I teach training classes for Compaq reseller engineers (not work for them; just train for them), and very few of the people I talk with would consider selling NT to an "enterprise". This is literally one of those cases where marketing paints a very distorted picture of reality. Compaq only offers reseller training for NT because Microsoft has apparently convinced them that NT is the only important platform. But even in a class that is clearly labelled as being about "StorageWorks on NT", here's the order in which people are interested in operating systems:
1. VMS -- that's right, VMS is the most popular OS I've seen in this case. Most VMS installations use clustering between five or six nodes, often distributed over a wide distance to protect against power outage or natural disaster.
2. UNIX -- generally Tru64 since these are Compaq resellers, also some Solaris. UNIX provides about the same reliability per node as VMS, but clustering isn't nearly as mature. As a result, it doesn't get used as much.
3. NT -- these are people who are selling low-end servers like departmental web servers and hoping for minimum effort, or who don't have a clue about their customer's needs and are selling NT for the hell of it.
4. A tie between Linux and Novell -- Novell sucks but is supported for use with this particular hardware that I'm teaching; Linux doesn't suck quite as much, but it has no support.
I talked to someone a few weeks ago who described a system he just sold -- 5 minutes of down time costs this customer about $500,000. That means that the 33 minute fsck costs about 3.3 million dollars. Do *you* want to tell this person that fsck is tolerable?
Chris Smith
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