16 Jul
2020
16 Jul
'20
8:35 a.m.
ATA? That long ago?
Sorry, IDE like. Forgot the terminology. You could put 4 drives on a
controller, then two controllers per unit (EISA was cool).
Possible but unusual in a server, I would have
thought.
What OS, just out of interest?
I think it was SCO Unix.
A single box? Oh dear.
We were so silly back then :-)
I've had catastrophic hardware failures, but
luckily, none that took
out a RAID controller. I've just heard the horror stories.
I remember pulling it. There was a hole where one of the ASIC chips was.
Pretty amazing to be honest, but oh well. Compaq took it back to the
factory for review.
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.
VMWare was *great*. I started using it on a small IBM box, then once I
realized it was like a true mainframe OS we bought a pair of IBM 366's
and a DS4300 SAN. Then upgraded the CPUs on them (4 CPUs). Then a set of
DS4700 SANs (redundant arrays of arrays with 2 controllers per array).
Then got a third so we could always run 2/3 of the cluster as opposed to
50% (for failover, see SystemPro). Then 3850's and 3950's with QPI
memory sharing. God that worked, I was able to get 70-80 servers per box
running away....
Much cheaper to run systems there than in the cloud. But everyone loves
the cloud, so off we go.
C