[Info-vax] Uptime for OpenVMS

[JF Mezei]

Mark Daniel wrote:

>> 1848 Days in the PAST is Monday - May 1st, 2006
> 
> This is an uncommon testament, not only to the system hardware, O/S and 
> applications but data centre design and implementation, operations staff 
> and company management.  Thanks Keith.


But also a testament of a stale system not getting new software or OS
updates.

In this day an age, it shouldn't be an individual node's uptime that
counts, but rather the "service availability". If you run a web server
farm designed so that you can shutdown one node at a time without
visible impact to users, then you can perform rolling upgrades.

VMS cluster maintains the cluster uptime (but can be misleading because
it is maintained through loss of quorum when your services are all down).

Other systems may not have the equivalent of "cluster uptime" because
availabiility is achieved via networking gear instead of at the OS level.

Back in the 1980s, system uptime was a very important metric. Less so now.

Cosnider the microsoft web site. Always available, but they probably
have to reboot each machine once every 10 minutes :-)