I mean seriously...are you stoned? What is your point?
Ever since the Model T... cars have had engines. But to hell if you'll be able to easily get a modern Ford engine to work in that old Model T. I mean thats an example of a something (an engine in this case) not being backwards compatible. It still does the same thing. Maybe they shouldn't version engines anymore, just call them something else.
Today engines can have turbo chargers, enhanced emission controls, variable valve timings, direct port fuel injection, etc. Drastically different and definitely not compatibily with older cars. However, they still make the wheels on the vehicle go round. They deserve to be called engines, regardless of the variations or enhancements or complete swapouts of thier subsystems.
Original design goal of the early engine was NOT fuel effiency, was NOT low noise, was NOT long life, was NOT lower emmisions. It was to help make the wheels go round.
Realize the end user names are not for your benefit as a scientist, engineer, or some BSing PHP/Perl programmer to recognize significant changes in implementaion. The are used as an identity for that project. End users can say, "oh, I have windows 98...here is a windows 98 compatible program. I can run this."
I seriously doubt your parents design goals for you were PHP/Perl programmer, or even anonymous coward. They probably gave you a name along the lines of Jack MeHoff, maybe even with similiar design goals.
Re:Do younger minds absorb quicker?
on
Ageism in IT?
·
· Score: 1
I see your point, but, a concert pianist isn't just some hack plucking keys for 20 years. He would have to be quite a bit more versed in modern music theory and concert performance. You start the pianist right off the bat as someone exceptional and diverse, yet limit and handicap the gifted programmer as if he couldn't read a book or collaborate about the latest programming techniques and apply them to his 8088 computer.
However, using your analogy, the 8088 programmer would still have experience in an assembly instruction set that is still widely used, C programming experience, experience in working with limited memory and cpu resources. These are skills that are still valued.
IT and development houses aren't the same places of prestige as a concert hall either. This useless 8080 programmer would be most valuable on embedded systems, compiler design, optimization, legacy system interfacing, POS systems...quite a bit of stuff in fact.
Both would be valuable, and both would have perfected their craft to an art that would have taught them valuable lessons that would port quite well whether it be to the latest synth/keyboard or the latest P4 xeon system.
Re:Do younger minds absorb quicker?
on
Ageism in IT?
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
The piano analogy works. Your dissection of it does not.
I can guarantee Beethoven never had a piano that could summon the sounds of a thousand instruments and provide ultra-realistic playback of them, variable tone and pitch generators, MIDI, stored memory of common chords playable at the touch of a single key, co-ordinated multi-tracked polyphonic doodad-this and that, and I'm sure there are some programs that will interface with written music formatted in XML, feed it to a keyboard and back again and let the composer do as he pleases.
Some could argue your point and insist that computers haven't changed all that much. As far as I can tell they still have cpu, memory, storage, input and output. They still require at their lowest level machine instructions to do anything useful. Sure there maybe programs and techniques stacked on top of that, that isolate you from having to type in and manipulate all those ones and zeros, but at the core computers haven't changed all that much.
Fundamentally, the principals are the same for a younger or even older programmer... input -> process -> output. Same for a musician, input -> instrument -> sound. Pianist and programmer still have the same keyboard, all the stuff behind it has been swapped out, and yes, now the input and output is slightly fancier. However, fundamentals of making programs or music remains the same, regardless of how sophisticated your instrument of choice, you can still make beautiful music or absolute noise.
Talent will determine how quickly you can make something resembling good output or music, experience on the other hand seperates the men from the boys when talent (gasp) is equal and is the real point of this article. The other point of the article, is that there are still stupid people in charge of hiring smart people, The stupid people could do there job correctly if perhaps they had some guidelines of what is illegal or not.
So your other point is, you can't sit with thumbs up your ass, and expect to keep in touch with the latest and greatest and be considered valuable. Please, point to another business where this isn't so?
What about Crazy Eddie! Just giving stuff away at these prices! Walmart "rolls-back" it's prices. K-Mart has blue light specials. I'd say that is getting creative about pricing. Other than *mark'ing the pricings' vehicle of deliver you are right.
I think protecting the actual numbers that correlate to the value of a product is ridiculous.
It seems to me from this article(?), someone is upset that someone is systematically inventoring (screen scraping) their system into a master database and making money off of listing it. Kind of like pricewatch.com but more flamboyant and annoying.
However, if they don't want to be listed then they should have right not to be. No? Companies spend millions of dollars making sure products sold under them are of such a quality that they deserve to be sold under their brand name and in the manner that they see fit.
Big companies may not like some nobody selling stuff along side their name that they worked hard to create and market regardless of their notariety in the publics mind.
They worked the deals, and the people, and the contacts to be able to sell the products they offer. Some screen scraping hack, didn't. Having a customer think big company is in cohoots with someone they deem of lesser quality can be unnerving and unsavory. There is more to this than just the consumer angle.
I mean the stock price isn't that high. How about all of us get together and stage a grass roots corporate take over. Asking for a vote to fire current management would be great.
Those two letter commands are a God send to people who know how to use their keyboard.
ls, mv, cp, rm, du, df, ps, cd, vi, ed, sed, awk, grep... all of them take minimal effort to type. I would be pissed as hell if I was forced to type all over the keyboard to type move, copy, remove, diskutilization, diskfilesystem, process, list, changedirectory, or anything else you maybe thinking would make it more intuitive.
I am not sure RMS fixed anything with --. When I want to list all processes I want to type...
ps -ef not "process --everything --full"
My hands would fall off if I had to type more, and unix would not be as light and breezy as it already is. The ease with which they can be typed makes them powerful to me.
As for his point, if you are not respected or reaching your full potential because your vocabulary is limited don't blame the English language. If you want to express complex and powerful ideas in a succinct and professional manner you are going to have to learn something. Same thing with your computer, you are probably going to be judged by your proficiency in it's use. Words can be used in many but certain ways, complaining that there are too many words (which happens to make some of them obscure and archaic or even hard to spell) sounds childish.
man pages are the dictionary, the shell is an Oxford English professor, and understanding is yours to claim.
First off let me say I own a TiVo, I love it. I'll be deep in the cold cold ground before I give it up. I like the TiVo, because it is dedicated to just recording my shows, I don't have to screw with it. If I had a PVR on my computer, I would find myself treating it like a production machine, and would not enjoy that computer the way I am used to.
What I do, is I have a laptop, a couch, and a TV with a TiVo. The TV and the couch are arranged in such a way, that I can lay down length wise along the couch and watch TV by just looking slightly to the right of my feet. I then take my wireless laptop computer and put it on my lap (go figure). I often have an end pillow or two underneath my legs to give my lap a nice angle. Right now, I can glance at my laptop screen or the TV, just by shifting my eyes (very similiar to your setup).
We have four linux machines using Oracle 9i RAC for our database. The boxes are penguin computing 200x Relions each with qlogic 2200 fibre channel cards and an Intel 10/100 dual nic card, which ties into our SAN'd up Clariion 4500 disk processor/array. The three nics (including the onboard) gives us a frontend/app network, backup network, and an oracle IPC interface.
We have had success using Redhat 7.1 (upgraded kernel to use LVM) and Suse 7.2 (comes w/LVM) for the linux distribution. Do not attempt RAC or OPS without an LVM of some sort. It can be done, but it shouldn't.
The biggest expense you will have is the disk array, and you should not skimp on this. Buy fast reliable maintained disk.
The Linux solution beats out Sun solutions in price hands down. You are talking $30,000 per box for the minimal Sun allowed hardware requirement for the Sun Cluster software with the Oracle Parallel DB runtime licenses (this has changed with v3 and so have the hw requirements). The Sun Cluster software requires an extensive review process by Sun which basically insures your company has two extra of everything and can be onsite to help Sun with their software and hardware in 4 hours. If your company doesn't have it's shit together, Sun and the few vendors that even know what Sun Cluster is aren't even going to bother talking to you about it.
This Linux solutions beats out a Windows NT solution in reliablity over the simple fact that the disk and volume management is clumsy. There is no easy way to create labeled raw devices on a Windows machine. The process as I remembered it was creating unlabeled logic partitions for each disk space and then maintaining a file pointing to the value of the related registry key to map out the tablespaces. As soon as you added a partition, modified a partition, or even used another node to look at the partition table, you and the database were screwed (i.e. restore). This problem with managing shared disk may have been fixed in 2000.
The weakest point in the entire Oracle 9i RAC is the cluster software layer. Whether you are using Sun's Cluster Software, the Oracle supplied cluster manager for Linux, or the hardware vendor supplied OSD layer for Windows. Be prepared to spend serious time in monitoring and getting it under control with appropriate patches.
Once you have fought your way through all of this you can reap in the rewards that multiple nodes with shared data gives you. The greatest benefit is the ability to partition your data and your application which allows you more opportunities to scale. If your data does not partition by some logical means (date, timezone, city, planet, etc) forget about it. Just get a big honking database machine (especially you SAP/Peoplesoft poor SOBs).
This follow up appears to be only related to your limited sphere of knowledge. DCE-RPC and other non CORBA implementations suffer from the same problems (previously mentioned) as XML-RPC, there is no advancement in the technology, just bloat. All that XML-RPC done is taken the RPC concept and changed the protocol with a heavier one and the requirement that the server needs an XML parser. Again, why not just use CORBA?
Extending interfaces is another solved problem. You simply version the interfaces, like you would in XML-RPC or any network application for that matter. The problem is still there, and is not uniquely solvable in XML-RPC. Reverse Engineering the CORBA protocol is ridiculous, the spec is published and well-known.
I am not sure I have ever seen a DCOM library for *nix or MacOS. I have seen DCE-RPC implementations for *nix and MVS. As for CORBA not being on windows platforms (what about TAO, mico, Orbix, Orbacus), take a look at http://adams.patriot.net/~tvalesky/freecorba.html CORBA like XML-RPC will run on anything. It was designed that way.
The short story is really, laziness/ignorance to engineer a proper protocol that won't hog bandwidth is not an excuse to reinvent the wheel as a square. I would grudgingly use XML-RPC for local machines and small LANS, and CORBA across the internet not the other way around. Both, can take advantage of SSL/TLS, both have authentication mechanisms, just one is more light weight, more robust, and is consistent across platforms. CORBA can accomplish any task XML-RPC can and more.
A simple spec is nice and makes development easy for anyone with a computer to implement a simple xml-rpc server and client combo, but what about standards in marshalling the server code, state, transactions, and persistence?
I have looked at several implementations of xml-rpc and non of them have been consistent in thier implementation. C/C++, python have server and client handling one way, perl has it another, and java has it another. Are any of these thread safe? A combination of Apache with mod_perl, mod_jserv/tomcat, zope or whatever could be, but then why not use a CORBA implementation which has all of these things and more (event service, property service, trading services, naming service)?
Reinventing the wheel with a heavy application protocol on top of another doesn't make much sense to me. Remote proceedure calls are a solved problem, many times over (sockets, sunrpc, CORBA, EJB, DCOM, even CGI). xml-rpc is also in my opinion too little, and quite a bit late.
CORBA like xml-rpc is platform independent and language independent. There are standards that can be relied on and it works. Using XML for everything from configuration files to application protocols to solving world hunger is inappropriate. Just because XML content is readable, doesn't mean it has to be used for everything. Just because http is everywhere doesn't mean it is the right protocol for the job at hand. I have found http is great at serving lots of information quickly, I have found it poor in recieving information, and recovery of connections and state.
Finally, I know in CORBA that I can go from one vendors implementation to another and the methods used will be 99% if not 100% the same. The mechanical details of the name service and implementation repository maybe different, but the code will look the same.
Having worked in a datacenter with several high end databases, I can't recommend EMC enough. Their disk is fast, reliable, and robust. Their Symmetrix line has onboard cache (gigs of it), direct SCSI connects, fully redundant everything, and the best part of all, EMC support. The arrays dial out when a disk goes bad (or anything else for that matter), the next day an EMC tech is at your datacenter with disk under arm ready to replace it. You really never have to worry about disk problems again. You can even do firmware upgrades with the disk online!
If you are running a medium to large database like a few terabytes. I would recommend investing in their TimeFinder solution, which allows you to make exact copies of the database (or data) by splitting the disks via a third mirror which they call Business Continuity Volumes (BCVs). This makes backups quicker and easier(simply split the third mirror and mount the volumes to your backup host), database schema changes less risky (split the mirror before the change, and you have a speedy backout), and overall your life easier (you will sleep at night).
The above is making the assumption that you are also using a real database such as Oracle that can handle raw devices, and online backups, multiple nodes, etc.
If you can't afford the Cadillac, you can go for the lower end which is their Clariion arrays which is also a damn good little unit if your budget is tight. You can essentially do the same things, except it's not as slick. Either one of them can go up to several terabytes of storage per unit.
Until linux has that, (and the buggy Linux LVM is the closest I've seen) AIX is still better. Runtime manipulation of the filesystem and volume groups is a must for an enterprise based system.
Slashdot Mirror
...find out who brings the donuts.
Intelligent answers deserve intelligent questions.
I mean seriously...are you stoned? What is your point?
Ever since the Model T... cars have had engines. But to hell if you'll be able to easily get a modern Ford engine to work in that old Model T. I mean thats an example of a something (an engine in this case) not being backwards compatible. It still does the same thing. Maybe they shouldn't version engines anymore, just call them something else.
Today engines can have turbo chargers, enhanced emission controls, variable valve timings, direct port fuel injection, etc. Drastically different and definitely not compatibily with older cars. However, they still make the wheels on the vehicle go round. They deserve to be called engines, regardless of the variations or enhancements or complete swapouts of thier subsystems.
Original design goal of the early engine was NOT fuel effiency, was NOT low noise, was NOT long life, was NOT lower emmisions. It was to help make the wheels go round.
Realize the end user names are not for your benefit as a scientist, engineer, or some BSing PHP/Perl programmer to recognize significant changes in implementaion. The are used as an identity for that project. End users can say, "oh, I have windows 98...here is a windows 98 compatible program. I can run this."
I seriously doubt your parents design goals for you were PHP/Perl programmer, or even anonymous coward. They probably gave you a name along the lines of Jack MeHoff, maybe even with similiar design goals.
I see your point, but, a concert pianist isn't just some hack plucking keys for 20 years. He would have to be quite a bit more versed in modern music theory and concert performance. You start the pianist right off the bat as someone exceptional and diverse, yet limit and handicap the gifted programmer as if he couldn't read a book or collaborate about the latest programming techniques and apply them to his 8088 computer.
However, using your analogy, the 8088 programmer would still have experience in an assembly instruction set that is still widely used, C programming experience, experience in working with limited memory and cpu resources. These are skills that are still valued.
IT and development houses aren't the same places of prestige as a concert hall either. This useless 8080 programmer would be most valuable on embedded systems, compiler design, optimization, legacy system interfacing, POS systems...quite a bit of stuff in fact.
Both would be valuable, and both would have perfected their craft to an art that would have taught them valuable lessons that would port quite well whether it be to the latest synth/keyboard or the latest P4 xeon system.
SCO's SEC filing says IBM case may be long, costly affair
5 58 28414118.html
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/06/19/10
The piano analogy works. Your dissection of it does not.
I can guarantee Beethoven never had a piano that could summon the sounds of a thousand instruments and provide ultra-realistic playback of them, variable tone and pitch generators, MIDI, stored memory of common chords playable at the touch of a single key, co-ordinated multi-tracked polyphonic doodad-this and that, and I'm sure there are some programs that will interface with written music formatted in XML, feed it to a keyboard and back again and let the composer do as he pleases.
Some could argue your point and insist that computers haven't changed all that much. As far as I can tell they still have cpu, memory, storage, input and output. They still require at their lowest level machine instructions to do anything useful. Sure there maybe programs and techniques stacked on top of that, that isolate you from having to type in and manipulate all those ones and zeros, but at the core computers haven't changed all that much.
Fundamentally, the principals are the same for a younger or even older programmer... input -> process -> output. Same for a musician, input -> instrument -> sound. Pianist and programmer still have the same keyboard, all the stuff behind it has been swapped out, and yes, now the input and output is slightly fancier. However, fundamentals of making programs or music remains the same, regardless of how sophisticated your instrument of choice, you can still make beautiful music or absolute noise.
Talent will determine how quickly you can make something resembling good output or music, experience on the other hand seperates the men from the boys when talent (gasp) is equal and is the real point of this article. The other point of the article, is that there are still stupid people in charge of hiring smart people, The stupid people could do there job correctly if perhaps they had some guidelines of what is illegal or not.
So your other point is, you can't sit with thumbs up your ass, and expect to keep in touch with the latest and greatest and be considered valuable. Please, point to another business where this isn't so?
alot of IBM AIX customers are going to get this letter:
Yeah, all 9 of them
aww, how cute...yet another clueless newb wannabe. AIX rocks, however, you don't. Go sit down.
What about Crazy Eddie! Just giving stuff away at these prices! Walmart "rolls-back" it's prices. K-Mart has blue light specials. I'd say that is getting creative about pricing. Other than *mark'ing the pricings' vehicle of deliver you are right.
I think protecting the actual numbers that correlate to the value of a product is ridiculous.
It seems to me from this article(?), someone is upset that someone is systematically inventoring (screen scraping) their system into a master database and making money off of listing it. Kind of like pricewatch.com but more flamboyant and annoying.
However, if they don't want to be listed then they should have right not to be. No? Companies spend millions of dollars making sure products sold under them are of such a quality that they deserve to be sold under their brand name and in the manner that they see fit.
Big companies may not like some nobody selling stuff along side their name that they worked hard to create and market regardless of their notariety in the publics mind.
They worked the deals, and the people, and the contacts to be able to sell the products they offer. Some screen scraping hack, didn't. Having a customer think big company is in cohoots with someone they deem of lesser quality can be unnerving and unsavory. There is more to this than just the consumer angle.
I mean the stock price isn't that high. How about all of us get together and stage a grass roots corporate take over. Asking for a vote to fire current management would be great.
Those two letter commands are a God send to people who know how to use their keyboard.
ls, mv, cp, rm, du, df, ps, cd, vi, ed, sed, awk, grep... all of them take minimal effort to type. I would be pissed as hell if I was forced to type all over the keyboard to type move, copy, remove, diskutilization, diskfilesystem, process, list, changedirectory, or anything else you maybe thinking would make it more intuitive.
I am not sure RMS fixed anything with --. When I want to list all processes I want to type...
ps -ef not "process --everything --full"
My hands would fall off if I had to type more, and unix would not be as light and breezy as it already is. The ease with which they can be typed makes them powerful to me.
As for his point, if you are not respected or reaching your full potential because your vocabulary is limited don't blame the English language. If you want to express complex and powerful ideas in a succinct and professional manner you are going to have to learn something. Same thing with your computer, you are probably going to be judged by your proficiency in it's use. Words can be used in many but certain ways, complaining that there are too many words (which happens to make some of them obscure and archaic or even hard to spell) sounds childish.
man pages are the dictionary, the shell is an Oxford English professor, and understanding is yours to claim.
Damn, Damn, Damn. I am such a sucker. They really should make this.
First off let me say I own a TiVo, I love it. I'll be deep in the cold cold ground before I give it up. I like the TiVo, because it is dedicated to just recording my shows, I don't have to screw with it. If I had a PVR on my computer, I would find myself treating it like a production machine, and would not enjoy that computer the way I am used to.
What I do, is I have a laptop, a couch, and a TV with a TiVo. The TV and the couch are arranged in such a way, that I can lay down length wise along the couch and watch TV by just looking slightly to the right of my feet. I then take my wireless laptop computer and put it on my lap (go figure). I often have an end pillow or two underneath my legs to give my lap a nice angle. Right now, I can glance at my laptop screen or the TV, just by shifting my eyes (very similiar to your setup).
It works great for me.
We have four linux machines using Oracle 9i RAC for our database. The boxes are penguin computing 200x Relions each with qlogic 2200 fibre channel cards and an Intel 10/100 dual nic card, which ties into our SAN'd up Clariion 4500 disk processor/array. The three nics (including the onboard) gives us a frontend/app network, backup network, and an oracle IPC interface.
We have had success using Redhat 7.1 (upgraded kernel to use LVM) and Suse 7.2 (comes w/LVM) for the linux distribution. Do not attempt RAC or OPS without an LVM of some sort. It can be done, but it shouldn't.
The biggest expense you will have is the disk array, and you should not skimp on this. Buy fast reliable maintained disk.
The Linux solution beats out Sun solutions in price hands down. You are talking $30,000 per box for the minimal Sun allowed hardware requirement for the Sun Cluster software with the Oracle Parallel DB runtime licenses (this has changed with v3 and so have the hw requirements). The Sun Cluster software requires an extensive review process by Sun which basically insures your company has two extra of everything and can be onsite to help Sun with their software and hardware in 4 hours. If your company doesn't have it's shit together, Sun and the few vendors that even know what Sun Cluster is aren't even going to bother talking to you about it.
This Linux solutions beats out a Windows NT solution in reliablity over the simple fact that the disk and volume management is clumsy. There is no easy way to create labeled raw devices on a Windows machine. The process as I remembered it was creating unlabeled logic partitions for each disk space and then maintaining a file pointing to the value of the related registry key to map out the tablespaces. As soon as you added a partition, modified a partition, or even used another node to look at the partition table, you and the database were screwed (i.e. restore). This problem with managing shared disk may have been fixed in 2000.
The weakest point in the entire Oracle 9i RAC is the cluster software layer. Whether you are using Sun's Cluster Software, the Oracle supplied cluster manager for Linux, or the hardware vendor supplied OSD layer for Windows. Be prepared to spend serious time in monitoring and getting it under control with appropriate patches.
Once you have fought your way through all of this you can reap in the rewards that multiple nodes with shared data gives you. The greatest benefit is the ability to partition your data and your application which allows you more opportunities to scale. If your data does not partition by some logical means (date, timezone, city, planet, etc) forget about it. Just get a big honking database machine (especially you SAP/Peoplesoft poor SOBs).
A link is here. U.S. President is addressing the nation as of 1300.
"American" Airlines Flight "11"
Today is September 11th
What did the two towers look like?
This follow up appears to be only related to your limited sphere of knowledge. DCE-RPC and other non CORBA implementations suffer from the same problems (previously mentioned) as XML-RPC, there is no advancement in the technology, just bloat. All that XML-RPC done is taken the RPC concept and changed the protocol with a heavier one and the requirement that the server needs an XML parser. Again, why not just use CORBA?
Extending interfaces is another solved problem. You simply version the interfaces, like you would in XML-RPC or any network application for that matter. The problem is still there, and is not uniquely solvable in XML-RPC. Reverse Engineering the CORBA protocol is ridiculous, the spec is published and well-known.
I am not sure I have ever seen a DCOM library for *nix or MacOS. I have seen DCE-RPC implementations for *nix and MVS. As for CORBA not being on windows platforms (what about TAO, mico, Orbix, Orbacus), take a look at http://adams.patriot.net/~tvalesky/freecorba.html CORBA like XML-RPC will run on anything. It was designed that way.
The short story is really, laziness/ignorance to engineer a proper protocol that won't hog bandwidth is not an excuse to reinvent the wheel as a square. I would grudgingly use XML-RPC for local machines and small LANS, and CORBA across the internet not the other way around. Both, can take advantage of SSL/TLS, both have authentication mechanisms, just one is more light weight, more robust, and is consistent across platforms. CORBA can accomplish any task XML-RPC can and more.
A simple spec is nice and makes development easy for anyone with a computer to implement a simple xml-rpc server and client combo, but what about standards in marshalling the server code, state, transactions, and persistence?
I have looked at several implementations of xml-rpc and non of them have been consistent in thier implementation. C/C++, python have server and client handling one way, perl has it another, and java has it another. Are any of these thread safe? A combination of Apache with mod_perl, mod_jserv/tomcat, zope or whatever could be, but then why not use a CORBA implementation which has all of these things and more (event service, property service, trading services, naming service)?
Reinventing the wheel with a heavy application protocol on top of another doesn't make much sense to me. Remote proceedure calls are a solved problem, many times over (sockets, sunrpc, CORBA, EJB, DCOM, even CGI). xml-rpc is also in my opinion too little, and quite a bit late.
CORBA like xml-rpc is platform independent and language independent. There are standards that can be relied on and it works. Using XML for everything from configuration files to application protocols to solving world hunger is inappropriate. Just because XML content is readable, doesn't mean it has to be used for everything. Just because http is everywhere doesn't mean it is the right protocol for the job at hand. I have found http is great at serving lots of information quickly, I have found it poor in recieving information, and recovery of connections and state.
Finally, I know in CORBA that I can go from one vendors implementation to another and the methods used will be 99% if not 100% the same. The mechanical details of the name service and implementation repository maybe different, but the code will look the same.
Having worked in a datacenter with several high end databases, I can't recommend EMC enough. Their disk is fast, reliable, and robust. Their Symmetrix line has onboard cache (gigs of it), direct SCSI connects, fully redundant everything, and the best part of all, EMC support. The arrays dial out when a disk goes bad (or anything else for that matter), the next day an EMC tech is at your datacenter with disk under arm ready to replace it. You really never have to worry about disk problems again. You can even do firmware upgrades with the disk online!
If you are running a medium to large database like a few terabytes. I would recommend investing in their TimeFinder solution, which allows you to make exact copies of the database (or data) by splitting the disks via a third mirror which they call Business Continuity Volumes (BCVs). This makes backups quicker and easier(simply split the third mirror and mount the volumes to your backup host), database schema changes less risky (split the mirror before the change, and you have a speedy backout), and overall your life easier (you will sleep at night).
The above is making the assumption that you are also using a real database such as Oracle that can handle raw devices, and online backups, multiple nodes, etc.
If you can't afford the Cadillac, you can go for the lower end which is their Clariion arrays which is also a damn good little unit if your budget is tight. You can essentially do the same things, except it's not as slick. Either one of them can go up to several terabytes of storage per unit.
---Hey, it's me.
Until linux has that, (and the buggy Linux LVM is the closest I've seen) AIX is still better. Runtime manipulation of the filesystem and volume groups is a must for an enterprise based system.
Swear to god, I only eat like 20 a day, and I spend half my day in the bathroom, pissing.
I think a twelve gauge shotgun would convince me of the fault tolerance. Otherwise, I'm not forking out $26 million for one.