Fault Tolerant Hardware: No Fast Restarts, It Simply Keeps On Computing

Andy Bailey

Andy Bailey, 27/07/2010, posted in "Analysis"

Andy Bailey is Availability Architect at Stratus Technologies. When not blogging about High Availability, Continuous Availability and Fault Tolerance, he enjoys fast cars and relaxing with his Pipe Organ. ...more info

Andy Bailey is Availability Architect at Stratus Technologies. When not blogging about High Availability, Continuous Availability and Fault Tolerance, he enjoys fast cars and relaxing with his Pipe Organ. ...less info

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I often wonder about the back-end infrastructure that supports new services which are likely to increase demand, as highlighted in this article about a new mobile billing service.

It’s the last sentence though, that really summarises the article and, of course, it’s all about customer satisfaction.

Whatever a great new service provides, the customer will only ever be satisfied if the service is available (and secure). So back to the infrastructure – there is no detail in this piece but I would like to bet that it relies on some sort of clustering technology which will give, on the face of it, high levels of availability.

I was only talking to a pretty smart chappie this morning who summed up clustering/HA by saying that he didn’t buy into all the marketing hype and his view was that it was merely fast restart technology. And he’s right – all these systems basically crash and have to restart. This technology was not good enough for his application/solution which is why he is deploying on fault tolerant hardware.

No fast restarts – it simply keeps on computing.