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back to article Stratus makes $50,000 zero downtime promise

Fault-tolerant server company Stratus is betting real money that its latest range of servers running VMware will never fail - for at least six months. The company is backing its words with action: it has issued a promise that new and existing Stratus users will experience no unplanned downtime with its new top-of-the-range 2. …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Two of everything?

    So suppose one of the {cpus, ...} isn't performing as it should, and you detect a discrepancy. Which one is wrong?

    For that reason you need either one ship's clock, or three. Never two. I suppose naval wisdom is a bit below stratus then?

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    1. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      Not quite

      It has 2 pairs of cpus. One pair per card. Both cards get the same task to process, if one pair performs an operation and the results differ, that card is ignored and the other card is used.

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    2. JAmato
      Reply Icon

      The Navy notwithstanding...

      Today's CPUs are quite good at telling when they're doing something wrong. There are a lot of 'breadcrumbs' to make the proper determination. If a truly benign divergence happens in which both replicated halves are still machine-correct, then the one that has been running the OS and the applications the longest error-free is kept running. Experience has shown that these occurrences are rare, fortunately.

      Stratus used to offer triple redundant servers as well, but field data and long-term analysis showed that the increased availability protection was negligible (in the noise, really) compared to the high increase in cost.

      (disclaimer: I'm a design engineer at Stratus Technologies, so I do look at this data quite a bit over morning bagel and OJ) :-)

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  2. AdamH
    Headmaster

    Re: two of everything.......

    Presumably through a unique identifier for each FRU that is picked up from the firmware, handled by the systems management software and reported back to base....................

    Do I get a prize for STBO? :)

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    1. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      In a word, no.

      Do FRUs tell you which part is wrong? Amazing solution to errors in computing: Just never sell FRUs that make errors!

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