On Wed, Mar 30, 2005 at 12:24:08PM -0500, A. Khattri wrote: > On Wed, 30 Mar 2005, Digby Tarvin wrote: > > I have U160 SCSI Seagates in an old server that's been running 24x7 > for just over 5 years (not as long as you!). Mind you, a good quality > "server-grade" mobo (this is an Intel ISP2150 platform) goes a long way > too. We still have older Intel P-II and P-III server boards running > reliably. This is what you get when you go for name brand (Intel, Sun, > etc) hardware. > > Unfortunately, you do pay more for quality and reliability - usually > there's a mid-point where you get maximum bang for your buck without > sacrificing quality. > > Another approach is to plan for constant failures. Last night I went to > hear a presentation given by a Google engineer which was quite amusing. > > Google has thousands of servers all over the world. They use super cheap > PCs with consumer-grade drives and PSUs. Data is replicated across many > servers. They assume that everything will fail at some point and just plan > around it. If a server goes down, traffic is not directed to it until it > comes back up. The servers themselves are designed to have everything > easily replaced and therefore are very barebones. For example, PSUs held > in with velcro instead of screws (!) so its quick 'n' easy to rip out the > old and slap in a new one. In some data centers, a guy walks around > literally with huge cartloads of drives and PSUs :-) > Actually my memory wasn't entirely accurate. The oldest of these systems (at the BBC and ABC) has been running since the beginning of 1993, so its 12 years of continuoys operation. And the systems had around 24 hard drives on four SCSI busses, so there have been plenty of them in total world wide to average MTBF figures over.
As far as motherboards go, they are Motorola 68K VME bus based systems running the OS-9/68K operating system. The processor cards have been replaced - but as part of upgrades rather than failures. Now if you want to talk 'classic' PC hardware, the 24/7 home server (on which I am typing this) is a DECpc 66Mhz 486 (I expanded the memory to the full 32MB) running BSD/OS 3.1. It is quiet, reliable, and didn't cost me anything as an employer wrote it off about 5 years ago. My only concession to current hardware was to replace the 200MB hard drive with something about 100 times bigger :-) I like modest hardware because it promotes efficient code. And the performance is actually perfectly find for most of the software development I do. The only time it feels slow is when I use crypto software like ssh or large applications like netscape. My gentoo system, on the other hand, has a Tyan motherboard with dual 800MHz processors - not the top of the line these days, but it still feels rediculously fast compared to my antique.. Besides, I can remember when 'ram expandable to 1K' was a feature... Regards, DigbyT -- Digby R. S. Tarvin [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.digbyt.com -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
