15 Dec
2000
15 Dec
'00
1:51 p.m.
On Fri, 15 Dec 2000, Jim Strickland wrote:
in the world for modern mainframes - IBM still makes
them - because
some jobs require more computing horsepower and reliability than
modern pcs can deliver, and hooking one clydsdale to a big job instead
of 400 squirrels is alot easier and cost effective to manage.
I think it would be much more entertaining to watch 400 squirrels. Put my
vote in for the squirrels :)
And as for reliability, let me draw my line in the
sand and say that I
think using PCs for mission critical servers is not a good idea.
Even if you put a decent OS on them - Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, etc,
they're not designed or supported the way a real mini or mainframe is.
'course the flip side is you can keep another machine around for a
spare for a reasonable cost...
You can also get fairly robust PCs, with dual hot-swap power supplies,
dual (or more) CPUs, mirrored hard drives (or RAID), error-correcting
RAM, etc.
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org