Re: Debian hotswap and 5 9's
Hanasaki JiJi said:
> Any input on building systems that support hotswap and 5 9's uptime?
>
> What hardware? drivers? where to get them? costs?
I don't believe someone can build an x86 box that can give 5 9s uptime.
Thats what, something like 5 minutes of downtime per year? I believe
even less that a single instance of linux(e.g. 1 system) could provide
5 9s on any hardware..You need redundant motherboards, power supplies,
cpus, ram, disks, network, and of course it all needs to be hot swappable.
Sun's starcat 15k systems are pretty fancy, they can operate in a mode
which can make pairs of cpus mirror each other. So when a CPU fails the
other takes over w/o interruption, the OS doesn't even realize a CPU
has failed. Same for RAM. It's like RAID but for hardware :) quite
fancy, I think it had something like 15 power supplies too.
that said.. hotswap your best off I think going with SCA 80pin SCSI with
hotswap backplanes. really depends how much you want to spend, and what
kind of system you need(e.g. lots of ram? lots of processors? how many
hds? what size hds?). provide more info on what your looking for. I would
say the fastest way to get 5 9s of uptime is some sort of IBM S/390 system
running a couple hundred copies of linux in a load balanced or clustered
configuration. I think that is the highest end system that any vendor
officially supports. I don't think Sun offers linux on their 15k servers,
and I don't think HP offers linux on their Superdome or high end alpha
servers. Running linux on S390 is pretty painless too, I've had brief
exposure on it.
couple years ago when I was investigating S/390 systems the lowest end
ran about $60k I think. That was system only, excluding any support or
any of the goodies I think. Debian runs on S/390, though the system I
had access to had SuSE on it.
nate
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