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by wumbernang 4023 days ago
We had 11 years of uptime on a VAX cluster at a company I worked for in the late 1990s.

They took it down in 2001 to replace it with something that took up 2U of rack space, about 2kw less power and ran windows 2000.

I turned up in 2012 to replace it again with something cloudy and it had 11 years of uptime (well done NT!) again[1] so YMMV.

The cloud based version has gone down about 10 times (thanks Azure!).

[1] not a great position but this was on an isolated network with locked down everything so less of a problem than a normally networked system.
1 comments
nickpsecurity 4022 days ago
That's funny. I swear I've considered just buying up a boatload of used Alpha and Itanium machines to keep a VMS cluster going another decade. Put a guard in front of it to block any attacks due to its age or protocols. People might laugh but my stuff would stay running no matter what. Example below:

http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/brochures/commerzbank/comm...

Notice how the Intel hardware all failed when things heated up a bit. The AlphaServers running VMS just kept chugging along. The eventual fail-over didn't loose a single transaction. Aggravates me that I can't easily obtain such reliable IT hardware/software anymore outside eBay. I mean, HP NonStop sure as hell doesn't have a hobbyist program with used servers for $130. ;)

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wumbernang 4022 days ago
The mid-range HP stuff is pretty reliable. We had a DL380p Gen7 survive the switch underneath it catching fire. Had zero chassis failures on about 500 nodes in the last 12 years as well. Lose disks and power supplies all the time and the odd Ethernet interface but nothing else.

Agree with ebay. I still look around for Sun Ultra kit now and then but the wife has other ideas because it's noisy and expensive to run.

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nickpsecurity 4022 days ago
Wow! That is impressive. I appreciate the tip on those.

" I still look around for Sun Ultra kit now and then but the wife has other ideas because it's noisy and expensive to run."

The battle that never goes away. Haha. This is why you need a basement or soundproofed room for that stuff. That's on my todo list for next house.

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