[ale] One app per machine (was: uptime)

[djinn at djinnspace.com]

Never one to shy away from a good flame war....
I'm afraid I have to take exception to your criticism of not running two
"mission critical" apps on a single machine.  Granted, M$'s reasoning
is...uh...selfish, but if you're running mission critical apps, I was under the
impression that it was SOP to put them on different boxen for a variety of
reasons.  We, a small web apps provider, run our firewall on one Linux box, our
primary web server on another, and our database server on yet another.  DNS on a
fourth, etc.  That way, if one dies, our whole world doesn't come crumbling down
around us.   It's also less load on what amounts to dirt cheap Intel boxes.  A fair
to middlin' univerisity I have some contact with does the same thing, except
on real hardware...one big app per one big HP or Sun box.

What do ya'll think about the one-app-per-machine philosophy?  Is this
overkill?  What about if you've got some sort of HA clustering or other automatic
failover going on...does that reduce the need for a setup like this?

jenn

Wandered Inn wrote:

>
> I still disagree.  Everyone that has posted problems with Linux uptimes,
> have added various caveats, as you noted, running an unstable version.
> Other's mentioned hardware issues.
>
> I'll tell you this, if you stick enough hardware and software on NT
> you'll bring it down.  I tried to convince one of the NT admins to
> install mail server on our NT web server.  He told me that Microsoft
> recommends not to run two 'mission critical' apps on a single machine.
> Now whether this is because they want to sell another NT license or
> because they know it can't deal with it I don't know.
>
> My personal experience with NT servers and desktop machines (over the
> past 5 years) has been, as noted, if you add enough software/hardware,
> NT will go brain dead.
>
> Regarding your web services noted above, # of web sites is not
> benchmark, hits/day and complexity of the services (cgi?) would be more
> useful.
>
>

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