Except when they do go down. Not as a result of the processor itself, but as a result of the hiccups in the dependency chain.
In one case ours went down for a day when a backhoe hired for construction cut a power supply line. The data center batteries designed to give time for the desiel generator to kick-in were fine. The generator failed to start as a result of contaminated fuel despite monthly tests.
The second time was when an employee brought their 12 year old son into the raised floor environment. He found and pressed the haylon dump button for fire suppression. Staff were lucky to escape without suffocation.
The employee was fired and stricter entry requirements to the raised floor area were implemented.
> The generator failed to start as a result of contaminated fuel despite monthly tests.
I don’t think this is he first time I’ve heard such a thing. I wonder if the people running such tests know how long you have to run the generator to flush the fuel lines? And aren’t there failure modes for ICEs - and diesel in particular - where the engine stops working once it reaches operating temperatures?
I had a car that would occasionally conk out due to a damaged O2 sensor (due in turn to a crack in the manifold).
Raspis are cheap and simple. Fewer things to fail, but each part is more likely to fail. They have low cooling and power requirements though. I'd expect the storage to be the thing that fails most often.
The interesting experiment with raspis used in high uptime scenarios is when you make a cluster of them. If you aren't reliant on any one to stay up, then you can afford many more hardware failures than traditional clusters, albeit much less dense. You trade size, performance, and ease of maintenance for systemic reliability. Unfortunately, I can't find the articles that look at this.
IO bandwidth is also a serious issue. You can run 250K interactive users and 1K printers and 25 or so tape drives quite easily off a mainframe cluster. Probably not off a pi, LOL.
In one case ours went down for a day when a backhoe hired for construction cut a power supply line. The data center batteries designed to give time for the desiel generator to kick-in were fine. The generator failed to start as a result of contaminated fuel despite monthly tests.
The second time was when an employee brought their 12 year old son into the raised floor environment. He found and pressed the haylon dump button for fire suppression. Staff were lucky to escape without suffocation.
The employee was fired and stricter entry requirements to the raised floor area were implemented.