OT:Exchange good? - And the flame wars begin (Was:Re:newhotness?)

[Eric Shubert]

Ben Browning wrote:
> Eric Shubert wrote:
>> Nice piece, Ben. I might add that with a reduction in hardware comes 
>> an increase in reliability.
> 
> To some degree, anyway... In N+1 clustering solutions, more hardware 
> leads to better stability.

Good point. My thinking context was in the absence of clustering and 
raid. These are must-use technologies for stability.

> I once had two servers with mission-critical 
> services on them both throw hard drive fits one night(they had 2x scsi 
> drives, but not RAIDED as we were using one exclusively for mail queue 
> IO), so I simply limped them along long enough to drain their queues and 
> halted them, dealing with them the next afternoon...
> 

Interesting.

I heard a story of a system with 2 raid1 drives. The drives came from 
the same lot which had a manufacturing defect. They died at the same 
time! :(

>> I worked on a server some time ago that had SCSI drives which had a 
>> MTBF of 36 years. The server had 72 of them. One failed every 6 
>> months, like clockwork.
> 
> I had a RAID under my control that had not been powered down in 5 years. 
> When we finally did, half the drives did not spin back up :)

Amazing what a little static friction can do!

-- 
-Eric 'shubes'