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A Quarter-Million Dollar Box For A Free OS
popeyethesailor writes: "According to a CNET story, the server startup Egenera will be debut its high end Linux servers for financial services customers, running Red Hat Linux.
An earlier CNETstory details their design." That's a hefty pricetag, but the companies they hope to sell to ("market--financial-services companies and service providers") aren't shy about investing in tools. Of course, an S/390 isn't cheap either, no matter how many GNU/Linux images it's running ;)
Looks like they bought a copy of the Redhat High Availability server for about $2000 and loaded it into a rack of CPU's.
Pretty much any competant tech could do it. I've had customers running systems like this for Geophysical 3D Migrations for over a year now. No big deal really.
It sure took me forever to find a "product" in their website. Mostly just organisational and marketing bullshit.
Check out www.rlxtechnologies.com. They have had the same technology available for almost a year now. The 'blade plane' for reducing the number of cables needed... etc... etc... And you can get three blades in a 3U case for $5k.
You probably are being too harsh. IBM Mainframes have MTBFs in the 50-year range. That's reliable.
An IBM mainframe will "call home" and order a replacement part as soon as it detects fluctuations in performance indicative of imminent failure.
When the CPUs are running, they're each really two CPUs - at a per-instruction level on the silicon itself, if the results from both CPUs
differ, the CPU is "retired".
There's similar failsafes and interlocks all through the system.
And the I/O throughput is both phenomenal, and transactional.
The PC has a MTBF of a few years, often much less. Thus, while you might get equivalent computing power, once you get up to a few hundred PCs, you spend as much time running around "changing lightbulbs" - i.e. replacing PCs that have failed, as doing useful work.
The PC hardware architecture is a "toy" compared to a mainframe, or even a commercial unix box, or (ironically, given the amiga's "toy" image) even an old amiga motherboard.