[Info-vax] Message from HP.

[JF Mezei]

On 13-12-10 03:17, David Froble wrote:
>
> I find this humorous.

So why is NSK saved while VMS and HP-UX tied to a pipe on E deck of the
sinking Itanic ?

I don't find it humourous.

> Just what can customers do to force HP, or anyone else, to do anything?

You are underestimating the power that NASDAQ and others have on on Wall
Street Casino Analysts who in turn influence the press, sherholders and
stock price.

Bad performance of the stock means board is changed.

> Look at entities such as Google assembling their own hardware.

Google doesn't care when a service goes down. People don't notice that a
search yielded only 100 results instead of 1000 because one or more
servers were down.

NASDAQ and banks care about transactions going through in full. Telling
the ATm to give you the money but then aborting before the balance is
reduced from your bank account is not something banks tolerate.


> Current x86 processors are commodities.

But there are ways to assemble a system where you can hot swap
components that have failed, there are ways where there is some hardware
supervisor that detects hardware faiults and failsover at hardware level
etc etc.

Go back to last century with the VAXft. It was both a hardware and
software solution.

So new NSK servers may have come commodity components, but they will
also have some specialised components to provide the failt
detection/failover/tolerance that customers want. (and components choses
to enable hot-swapping)

They won't have commodity desktop drives, they will have commodity high
end server drivers with MTBF numbers way up, SMART features etc.