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It's the former. You'd be insane to design critical infrastructure under the assumption that a single machine is going to stay up nonstop for 60 years.
by ianhowson 10y ago
It's the former. You'd be insane to design critical infrastructure under the assumption that a single machine is going to stay up nonstop for 60 years.
- dsfyu404ed 10y ago>You'd be insane to design critical infrastructure under the assumption that a single machine is going to stay up nonstop for 60 years. With a definition of machine that's slightly more broad than "single desktop box or server" then I think 60yr is a pretty reasonable uptime goal. Something with redundancy and hot swap capabilities should have no problem getting several decade uptime. These are embedded devices, it's not like a nuclear reactor needs to reboot frequently.
- ianhowson 10y agoOf course you could design a machine that can run for 60 years. It's just a bad idea to depend on it. A nuclear reactor has regulatory oversight and a risk management plan. It must survive the failure of any single component, no matter its reliability target. Over 60 years, those 'highly unlikely' threats -- earthquake, terrorist attack, military action -- they become 'kinda probable'. No single component can survive these, and you'd be foolish to try.
- hazeii 10y agoPDP-11's are still powering nuclear reactors to this day - a few years back GE were looking for programmers to keep them going (interesting to me, since I programmed them in octal and Macro-11 back in the early 80's). http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/19/nuke_plants_to_keep_pdp11_until_2050/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/19/nuke_plants_to_keep_...
- boznz 10y agoI suspect my citizen solar digital watch I got in 1989 will still be "ticking" long after I'm gone. Likewise several of the PLC's I know have been up for 20+ years
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]