George Herbert <george.herbert@gmail.com> said:
I worked for a Sun clone vendor (Axil) for a while and took some of our
systems and storage to Comdex one year in the 90s. We had a RAID unit
(Mylex controller) we had just introduced. Beforehand, I made REALLY REALLY
SURE that the pull-the-disk and pull-the-redundant-power tricks worked. And
showed them to people with the "Please keep in mind that this voids the
warranty, but here we *rip* go...". All of the other server vendors were
giving me dirty looks for that one. Apparently I sold a few systems that
way.
Nice. Thanks.
Many years ago, I worked for one of DEC's research groups. We built a
network using FDDI 4B/5B link technology based on AMD TAXI chips. (They were
state of the art back then.) The switches were 3U(?) boxes with 12 ports.
It took a rack of 6 or 8 of them in the phone closet to cover a floor.
Workstations had 2 cables plugged into different switches. In theory, we
covered any single point of failure.
My office was near the phone closet. I got to watch my boss give demos to
visiting VIPs. He was pretty good at it. In the middle of explaining
things, he would grab a power cord and yank it. Blinka-blinka=blinka and the
remaining switches would reconfigure and go back to work. (It took under a
second.)
It was interesting to watch the VIPs. Most of them got it: the network
really could recover quickly. The interesting ones had a telco background.
They were really surprised. The concept of disrupting live traffic for
something as insignificant as a demo was off scale in their culture.
It was just a research lab. We were used to eating our own dog food.