On Sat, Jun 03, 2000 at 06:25:37PM +0100, James Sutherland wrote:
> Every "component" is mounted on a carrier board; this then connects to
> a
> pair of backplanes. Each individual component can, obviously, be
> replaced;
> you can also remove/disable one backplane at once without downtime.
So, you've essentially got two complete systems (once you add up all the
components) in a single box. What does this buy you above having two
completely independant boxes? I wouldn't be surprised if a single box
with all the redundant components costs more than the total price of two
seperate boxes.
BTW, does hardware like this exist yet? I've seen Compaq's with
hot-swap CPU and RAM support, but nothing with dual motherboards.
> The next issue is to enable software upgrades without downtime. For
> applications, this can be done by installing the new version, then
> signalling the old version to "exec" the new one. (Apache can do
> something
> similar with configuration files already.) For a WWW server, for
> example,
> this can be done without dropping or refusing a single connection.
Note that having seperate boxes would solve this problem as well. Just
upgrade one, bring it back up, and then upgrade the other.
-- Bruce Guenter <bruceg@em.ca> http://em.ca/~bruceg/- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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