North Central Mo - Chillicothe | You're right Ed.
I was working on VAX clusters starting in about 1986 when we thought dual ported disks were a big deal. I worked on clusters until about 2002 and I laugh when people talk about automatic fail-over systems. Holy cow, we had some of that stuff working in the 80's. I'm always surprised when people think that "clustering" is a big deal. Been there, done that, seems like a long time ago now.
The one thing that modern clusters don't have that VMS had way back then is a distributed lock manager. The ability to lock a "record" on disk so that multiple systems (members of a cluster) could access the record but not over-write changes and get them in the right order.
One of the things that amazes me about modern hardware is that intelligence of RAID controllers. The ability to hot-swap drives on a server and, as you said, have them keep right on running. In the first clusters, that took a pretty large and expensive piece of hardware. Now, it's just a PCI card.
Didn't think I'd every be talking about the good old days of VMS on an ag site.
TF |
Thinking about switching to a Mac
