[rescue] Prime Time

[Brian Harrington]

On Wed, 13 Jun 2001, Dave McGuire wrote:

> On June 13, Joshua D. Boyd wrote:
> > What exactly is this "prime time" anyway?  Linux (and *bsd) are obviously
> > being used sucessfully in very high profile bet the company systems, so
> > what more is needed for "prime time"?
>
>   "Prime time" is simply defined: my former coworkers and I didn't give
> it a second thought when we were deploying hundreds of console-less
> zero-babysitting Sparc5 machines running NetBSD onto other peoples'
> networks as satellite downlink controllers.  The hardware and the
> software Just Works...no bullshit.  That's how *I* define "ready for
> prime time".

Well, since Joshua threw in the *BSD, I'll give my different definition of
"prime time".  What do you use on your "one big box"?  Given a
medium-sized machine (a E5500 or an IBM S70, let's say) and a copy of
Oracle or DB2, what do you build your backend with?  The free unixes are
great in the lots of small boxes department, but when it comes to managing
the big database server, the features and scalability just aren't there.
You have to remember that even Solaris is a relative newcomer to this
market, and MVS and VMS and even OS/400 (heaven help us) are all stronger
players than NT (although M$ is certainly trying).  Even Linux/390 is all
about displacing several hundred PCs, not switching over the gazillion
transaction per secend MVS box.

I actually went through this on a smaller scale at work a while back, when
after having an AIX Moment (tm) on my F50, I started to download LinuxPPC.
But then I thought about giving up JFS and the cool IBM LVM, along with
half a dozen other things I just take for granted every day, and AIX
stayed on the box.  (It's not really so bad, as long as I stop trying to
pretend it's unix. :-)

                    -- Brian

--
Brian Harrington
Milton S. Eisenhower Library
The Johns Hopkins University
brian at sigh.mse.jhu.edu