From: Daniel Phillips <phillips@phunq.net>
To: ric@emc.com
Subject: Re: [ANNOUNCE] Ramback: faster than a speeding bullet
Date: Thu, 13 Mar 2008 11:02:47 -0800
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Cc: Lars Marowsky-Bree <lmb@suse.de>, Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>,
       Grzegorz Kulewski <kangur@polcom.net>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
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On Thursday 13 March 2008 06:27, Ric Wheeler wrote:
> >>> So "perfectly reliable if UPS power does not fail" seems a bit over the
> >>> top.
> >> It works for EMC :-)
> > 
> > Where they control the hardware and run a rather specialized OS as well,
> > not a general purpose system like Linux on "commodity" hardware ;-)
> 
> Actually, in Centera we use generic hardware with a fairly normal kernel 
> which has strategic backports from upstream (libata, nic drivers, etc).
> 
> No UPS in the picture.  Data integrity is protected by working with the 
> application team to insure they understand when data is safely on the 
> disk platter and working with IO & FS people to try and make sure we 
> don't lie to them (too much ) about that promise.
> 
> The centera boxes are tested with power failure & error injection and by 
> all of our customers in all those ways customers do ;-)

Hi Ric,

Right, so Linux has gotten to the point where it competes with purpose-
built embedded software in reliability.  Not quite there, but close
enough for mission-critical.

I was not thinking of Centera when I mentioned the UPS though...

Daniel
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