Ron Johnson wrote:
On 12/19/08 13:09, Nate Duehr wrote:Douglas A. Tutty wrote:On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 08:42:15PM -0600, Ron Johnson wrote:On 12/17/08 19:51, Douglas A. Tutty wrote:As far as I know, Debian doesn't have an installer feature likeOpenBSD's where you can boot the installer, set up the disk partitions,and run restore right from there (from tape, presumably a raw drive partition as well, I don't know).That's one "large-systems" feature which Linux really misses.Real large-systems aren't taken off-line or ever restored from that low a level, usually.If they are, it's because there was 8 feet of water in the server room,Or an idiot plumber with a brazing torch sets off the sprinklers, which dump thousands of gallons of water, which, naturally, flow down to the sub-basement data center, dropping right down on top of "my" SAN.and even then, you probably failed over to your cold-site before it got that bad.Unless the gov't agency who's contracted with you is too cheap to pay for a cold-site. (Of course, after the "rain shower", they wised up and now pay for the cold site.)If you just had a hardware failure, you're probably already running on the warm/hot spare system by the time you look into it.So... you might be thinking "mid-sized" PC-based systems. ;-)No, these actually are large systems. A combination of Z/OS, OpenVMS and HP-SUX all in a 24x364 DC. Lots and lots of tape silos and twice daily visits from Iron Mountain couriers.
Agreed. In fact, I would say the vast majority of the large systems out there do not have hot backups. It is very expensive to maintain a hot backup; unless it is super critical they be up 24/7 (i.e. airline reservation systems, NORAD, etc.), chances are they have regular backups and off-site storage.