Also, reactions on business continuity
Regarding “IBM worker’s day of action off to a slow start”: We may be approaching a time when, because of the potential for vast and comparatively sudden socio-economic dislocation in industrialized countries as a result of corporate mismanagement (IBM, GM, Ford, HP, Sun), government and stakeholders must take a hand in guiding such companies – companies that have in effect socialized themselves. By this I mean that their size creates multiplier effects that expand the class of stakeholders to include many of us, not just shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers and immediate communities in which they are located. They cannot be permitted to fail, nor can they be permitted to fail the legitimate expectations of society. Unfortunately, C-level jobs are largely acting jobs; seldom do managers of large corporations understand anything more than how to line their pockets at other’s expense. Simply paying them grotesque levels of compensation does not necessarily motivate superior or even useful performance. Indeed, it may have the opposite effect, generating hubris and recklessness because beyond a certain point, the money cannot even improve one’s lifestyle, even if ostentation knows no limits.
Tom Shillock
President
M2 Consulting
Portland, Ore.
Fault tolerance
I wonder why, when discussing business continuity, nothing is mentioned about making each compute node fault tolerant. Unlike recovery, proper fault tolerance resumes processing, usually in about 10 msec. Unlike traditional FT vendors like Tandem that had expensive, proprietary FT solutions, the newer FT claims from companies such as Stratus and Marathon do not resume or recover from the most common causes of server outages, transient errors where no permanent damage is incurred. What end users need, for both business continuity and lower total cost of ownership, is to increase server utilization rates significantly while being able to resume processing instantaneously with no loss of data or application continuity.
Keith Johnson
CEO
Reliable Technologies
Weston, Mass.
