[HN Gopher] Fault Tolerance in Tandem Computer Systems (1986)[pdf]
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       Fault Tolerance in Tandem Computer Systems (1986)[pdf]
        
       Author : sillywalk
       Score  : 9 points
       Date   : 2025-01-25 21:40 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (jimgray.azurewebsites.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (jimgray.azurewebsites.net)
        
       | pastureofplenty wrote:
       | Tandem was a special company for sure. My dad worked there in the
       | 80s and 90s and said it was the best job he ever had.
        
       | ghaff wrote:
       | Tandem reinvented themselves a number of times in the light of
       | various hardware changes, eventually ending up I believe on x86.
        
         | sillywalk wrote:
         | Yes. Proprietary CISC chips->MIPS->Itanium and ported to x86-64
         | around 10 years ago. Apparently is or will soon be offered "in
         | the cloud" as a "NonStop as a Service".
        
           | ghaff wrote:
           | I forgot about the MIPS step. Went to grad school with a guy
           | who was with Tandem and ended up in charge of HP's enterprise
           | servers. Not sure how network-accessed FT works from a
           | reliability perspective but I guess there are a lot of apps
           | where, if your network is down, you're toast anyway and there
           | are various ways to provide redundancy.
        
       | newman314 wrote:
       | So it probably sufficiently far removed now that I can talk about
       | it but I was involved in taking a look behind the scenes at a
       | telco over a decade ago while doing due diligence.
       | 
       | The telco had a pair of Tandem systems acting as the FTP server
       | for all the telco switches. Pretty wild if you think about it.
        
         | sillywalk wrote:
         | It seems like overkill for just FTP. Although I believe that
         | Tandem also was (is?) fairly common in running telco stuff,
         | plus billing.
        
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       (page generated 2025-01-25 23:00 UTC)