Re:New AMD EPYC-based Compute Engine family, now in beta
by aidenn0 on Thursday February 20, 2020 @11:59AM
(#22376467)
A small amount of work over a long period of time (i.e. setting up a redundant system) may be worse than losing a large amount of work in a short period of time.
Single machines just don't fail that often. I managed a database server for an internal tool and the machine failed once in about 10 years. It was commodity hardware, so I just restored the backups to a spare workstation and it was back up in less than 2 hours. 15 people used this service and they could get some work done, without it, so there was less than 30 person-hours of productivity lost. If I spent 30 hours getting failover &c. working for this system over a 10 year period, it would have been more hours lost for the company than the failure caused.
And anyway if you already have all in place to completely rebuild every SPOF machine from scratch in a few hours, go the extra mile and make it an active/passive cluster, even manually switched, and make the downtime a minutes thing.