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Comment by forapurpose | Hacker News Reader

Your comment leaves the impression that IBM mainframes, not to mention high-end Unix systems from Sun, IBM, and HP, commonly had problems that would crash the machines and had no better availability than my desktop or perhaps a $3K server.

Perhaps it was meant as hyperbole, but it would be interesting and valuable to hear some of the nuance from someone with your experience.

IME talking to people, many, especially mainframe operators, would disagree. My direct experience with mid-range Compaq/HP servers has been excellent - it's hard to remember a box going down unless I commanded it to. I don't think I replaced any except due to age or warranty expiration.

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> it's hard to remember a box going down unless I commanded it to

This could be a form of the law-of-large-numbers at work. If each customer only has a single box, and the failure rate is .1%, then 999 customers will never have a failure to remember, compared to the 1 who will.

What does it look like if each customer has 1000 boxes?

I've managed far more than one box, and far more desktops/laptops than servers. The servers have been far more reliable.

That doesn't really address my point.

I'm talking about the mainframe (or other high-end server) situation.

Granted, you were specifically referring to "mid-range Compaq/HP servers", so perhaps I didn't understand what mid-range meant.

If they're just a branded/enterprise version of commodity servers, I'm missing how those are representative of hardware HA of the kind that the OC finds almost always terrible.

If they're non-commodity, then I'm curious what their price tags are and if "far more than one box" equates to at least several hundred (else there's still a decent enough chance of not getting bitten by even a 1% failure rate).

Remember that a "box" is a unit for commodity.

Your mid sized mainframe will be at least a full rack, plus ancillaries. This can be analogous to a rack full of blades.

It can be analagous, but usually isn't, not in the vast majority of technical [1], administrative, or purchasing senses.

I'd argue that blades are already bordering on being outside of "commodity", at least in this context reliability, since a single chassis replaces some number of actually-commodity standalone boxes with both shared PoFs and highly-customized designs (especially high density that results in thermal unreliability if not outright failure).

[1] Although some blade systems did offer things like integrated shared switches, they failed to make them cheap enough, so, in practice, it didn't happen. Personally, I suspect there was never enough advantage to putting ethernet or even InfiniBand on a backplane instead of cables, not at blade chassis scale of a dozen nodes.

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