16 Jul
2020
16 Jul
'20
5:18 a.m.
On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 at 14:09, Chris Zach via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Funny story about that: In 1990 I installed a Compaq systempro for
Hechinger's that cost over $100,000.
I just about remember the SystemPro machines. One of my bigger clients
in my first job got one, but they hired a full-time guy to customise
their app for it, and he also became the sysadmin. A very early
example of devops, I suppose. So I never got to play around with it.
:-(
Had a full compliment of memory,
max internal disk on the ATA controller,
ATA? That long ago?
Possible but unusual in a server, I would have thought.
What OS, just out of interest?
and two external boxes of disks
with the smart SCSI-ish controller. Massive system running Sybase SQL.
Designed to replace a 24*7 mainframe and expected to be up all the time.
A single box? Oh dear.
Got a call 2 months later: The system had blown a hole
in one of the
disk controllers and was down. Called Compaq, they got someone on a
plane with a spare controller from the west coast and I drove out to
meet them in the middle of the night so we could get the system up by
morning.
That was pretty insane. And pointed out that "mainframe" PC's didn't
have anywhere near the redundancy or support of true mainframes.
Oh yes indeed.
I've had catastrophic hardware failures, but luckily, none that took
out a RAID controller. I've just heard the horror stories.
I finally left the support business in about 2011, but by then, it was
fairly standard practice to install VMware (the free VMware ESX
hypervisor if the company didn't have a paid vSphere site licence) on
all new boxes, then install the OS in that. Even if it was a dedicated
machine that only ran 1 OS ever. Because that way, if the machine
died, you could restore the backup onto a new, totally different box,
so long as it was running ESX, and it would Just Work? with no driver
or activation issues -- the virtualised hardware was the same.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
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