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From: Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: what's a mainframe, was is Vax addressing sane today
Date: Fri, 13 Sep 2024 09:54:45 -1000
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Terje Mathisen <terje.mathisen@tmsw.no> writes:
> Novell's System Fault Tolerant NetWare 386 (around 1990) supported two
> complete servers acting like one, so that any hardware component could
> fail and the system would keep running, with nothing noticed by the
> clients, even those that were in the middle of an update/write
> request.

late 80s, get HA/6000 project, originally for NYTimes to move their
newspaper system (ATEX) off VAXCluster to RS/6000. I then rename it
HA/CMP when I start doing technical/scientific scale-up with national
labs and commercial scale-up with RDBMS vendors (Oracle, Sybase,
Informix, Ingres) that had VAXCluster support in same source base with
Unix (I do distributed lock manager that supported VAXCluster semantics
to ease ports).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_High_Availability_Cluster_Multiprocessing

IBM had been marketing S/88, rebranded fault tolerant. Then the S/88
product administer starts taking us around to their customers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratus_Technologies
Also has me write a section for the corporate continuous availability
strategy document ... however, it gets pulled when both Rochester
(AS/400, I-systems) and POK (mainframe) complain that they couldn't meet
the requirements.

Early Jan92 in meeting with Oracle CEO, AWD/Hester tells Ellison that we
would have 16processor clusters by mid92 and 128processor clusters by
ye92. Within a couple weeks (end jan92), cluster scale-up is transferred
for announce as IBM Supercomputer (scientific/technical *ONLY*) and we
are told we can't work on anything with more than four processors (we
leave IBM a few months later).

-- 
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970