[Info-vax] Eisner? Down? (20 days later)

[Richard B. Gilbert]

Duncan Brown wrote:
> Richard B. Gilbert wrote:
>> If I needed 99.99% uptime, such a strategy would be risking my job!  
>> And I don't think I would be using technology that's now at least ten 
>> years old!  The SWXCR is AT LEAST that old.
>>
>> EISNER being a low/no budget volunteer based service, you have to 
>> expect some downtime.
>>
> 
> I was using (and learning to hate) SWXCRs in AlphaServer 2100 systems 
> back in 1996, so that's 12-13 years at least.
> 
> I expect some downtime with Eisner, which is why the lack of RAID would 
> seem to be perfectly acceptable.  It certainly takes a lot less than 20 
> days to toss another cheap big disk in and restore from backups.  I 
> wasn't recommending that strategy for a business system, no!
> 

I encountered SWXCRs ca. 2002 although I had heard of them years before 
that.  I bought two of them, used, for use with an Alphaserver 2000 and 
and an Alphaserver 4100.  It was "cheap RAID" and I needed that.  I 
think I paid about $35/each.  One was configured to do RAID-5 and the 
other did a couple of RAID-1 sets.  I used them for about two years and 
don't recall having any problems with them.

As for twenty days downtime, it's not good but it may be the best 
service available.  When a service is operated out of someone's home you 
learn to expect power failures, downtime when something fails and the 
owner is 3,000 miles away on a business trip or vacation, etc.  He may 
have died and his family hasn't a clue. . . .

If you want 24x365, you pay for the service.  There are companies that 
run data centers for profit and will host your machines/services for a 
moderately outrageous monthly fee.  They tend to have things like power 
feeds from two different substations, emergency generators, redundant 
air conditioners, T1/T3 service from two or more "points of presence", etc.

--
draco vulgaris