Tram Town
Thursday, December 04, 2003
| Category: Computers Years ago we heard of wonderful achievements that DEC had made with the design of VAX/VMS clusters and their potential to provide non-stop computing. It was treated at the time as so much marketing nonsense. We have been proved wrong. Back when they mattered, this would have made Tandem jealous... What is unusual about this cluster is that it has been running since April 1997 despite the addition of machines, upgrades to the operating system, upgrades to applications, a changeover to a SAN architecture and even the physical relocation of the machines to a new site some seven kilometers away. Yet, through all these changes the cluster has provided continuous IT services to the Amsterdam rozzers.Your level of admiration is probably tempered by suspicion of definitions of "uptime" but by any standards (except perhaps those of traffic light controllers) this is a pretty admirable result. Thanks to Clive for pointing this article out. |
