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Booting A PIII System In .8 Seconds
gizmo_mathboy writes: "General Software has announced the fastest BIOS boot time on record. The embedded system was clocked at 0.8 seconds from system power-on to transfer of control to LILO. This was on an Intel SOYO motherboard (440BX chipset) running a PIII 400. I think the quote of the article is: 'This Embedded BIOS quick-boot operation allows the device to restart and resume operations well within three seconds -- the maximum amount of downtime allowed per year for a device that must support "seven nines" or 99.99999 percent uptime.'"
Rather, I think the issue is minimizing the unexpected downtime that occurs at a critical moment. Lets say you are using a computer in surgical equipment. Let also say that, heaven forbid, there is a bug in the software code. While the surgeon is busy fiddling around inside the patients head, the equipment freezes up. Every second that it takes to restart the equipment, there is the possibility of harming the patient.
Obviously, equipment this critical should never ever crash. It's nice to know, though, that should something happen, the equipment will restart quickly.
Come test your mettle in the world of Alter Aeon!
(my emphasis)
A pet peeve of mine is that PHB's think that "device" uptime is the same as "system" uptime.
Decades ago, we had fault tolerant systems that had large-chunk redundancy. An entire mainframe could fail and the system kept serving.
OTOH, haven't you ever had a failing app take down your system, while running on perfectly healthy hardware?
The reason this misconception, that perfect-hardware==perfect-uptime, frustrates me, is that the PHB's get sold this bill of goods by hardware salespeople. Then they don't even allow for downtime to upgrade the effing OS every two years. Nor do they allow for a second system to either (a) take the load during an upgrade, or (b) test updates to the application.
For this silly reason, giant, fault-tolerant boxes are hurting, rather than helping, high-availability computing. Bosses would rather spend money on sexy hardware that won't solve the problem, instead of paying smart people who can design-in the uptime with combos of hardware, software, and procedures.
Quench-rant (for now).
Let's get out our calculators, class...
365.24 days per year (from Space.com. I don't know of any more accurate (more decimal places) numbers than this. Even if you were to add 5 whole days to the year though, it won't even add one one-hundredth of a second to the final result, so I think we can go with this).
99.9999999% of 365.24 = 365.23999963476
365.24 - 365.23999963476 = 0.00000036524 days
This is the maximum allowed downtime.
Assuming a day is exactly 24 hours long (I'm fairly sure it is),
0.00000036524 days = 0.00000876576 hours
0.00000876576 hours = 0.0005259456 minutes
0.0005259456 minutes = 0.031556736 seconds.
Thus, 99.9999999% percent uptime requires NO MORE than ~0.0315, that's three hundredTHs of one second, downtime, per year.
Nope, don't think we're there yet, but you keep pushing that 99.9999999 number if it makes you look good. After all, the general public can't do math either... =)
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
Ha-ha.
I perfer to have my computers QUIET, tidy and practical. Not some ugly pile of bare metal that sounds like a turbine engine.
You seem to be measuring dick-lengths here. Ok, you've got a speed fetish and are prepared to pay to get it. I on the other hand like the things I mentioned above and I am prepared to pay to get them. To you it might seem silly, but to me your need for speed is silly too.