Re:Stratus: Servers that won’t quit – The 24 year running co...
by yellowapple on Sunday January 29, 2017 @02:58PM
(#13516231)
Given the existence of things like Erlang/OTP, I doubt software is the big issue here.
Rather, the issue is that individual machines are cheap enough that you can have machine-level redundancy at a much lower cost than trying to engineer a single machine with redundant components.
The issue with machine-level redundancy is that they tend to run their own isolated operating systems (which is great from a fault-tolerance perspective, but is rather wasteful from a computational perspective). Operating systems like Plan 9 were billed to help bridge this gap and make clusters of machines communicating over 9P feel like a single unified whole, but they never seemed to catch on (besides maybe the concept of a Beowulf cluster).
Rather, the issue is that individual machines are cheap enough that you can have machine-level redundancy at a much lower cost than trying to engineer a single machine with redundant components.
The issue with machine-level redundancy is that they tend to run their own isolated operating systems (which is great from a fault-tolerance perspective, but is rather wasteful from a computational perspective). Operating systems like Plan 9 were billed to help bridge this gap and make clusters of machines communicating over 9P feel like a single unified whole, but they never seemed to catch on (besides maybe the concept of a Beowulf cluster).