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. 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...

> 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 :)


-- 
   Ben Browning <benb@bensbrowning.com>
Linux Systems Architect and Administrator
      http://www.bensbrowning.com/