| | Check out the new
Backup Critic Storage/Media Deals Page
Stratus Bows to Non-Proprietary Hardware/SoftwareBrian Robinson has written
an interesting story
about Stratus,
the maker of high-reliability, fault-tolerant computer systems.
In the old days, you paid very big bucks for a Stratus computer,
which came with highly proprietary (and redundant) hardware, it's own custom operating system,
and a telephone line the computer could use to order its own parts when
something broke on one half of the redundant system.
The article explains that Stratus has had to bow to the power of
the cheap Windows/Intel world, and now offers lower-end systems
that essentially achieve reliability by sending all transactions through
to two linked Windows/Intel machines.
The customer can write their code in good old Windows instead of
having to learn how to program in Stratus' VOS.
This is the same trend that makes it tempting just to pay another
$75 to build
RAID into your next home PC,
the same trend that makes people build web farms out of cheap commodity PCs
instead of paying bug bucks for a multi-processor Sun mini-computer.
When software/hardware gets cheap enough,
then sometimes the answer to "easy backup" is to just have two of everything!
See Also
Featured Article:
Why undelete
utilities may fail just when you need them most!
  May | |
