4 ms·

Hot swapping CPU and memory boards was pretty dope in 2000. Can't do that in equivalently priced hardware and servers as easily today.

• robocat 7y ago
  Because the unit of swappability changed to a VM or server... for good reasons.
  • scurvy 7y ago
    If that's the case, why do my VMs in public clouds constantly go down for hardware maintenance? We've definitely regressed despite the buzzwords and hype.
    • zorked 7y ago
      Most of the "hardware maintainance" is defragmenting the workload so that the VMs run in fewer physical machines to retire racks of old hardware. Some load balancing too.
      • IcePic 7y ago
        Or an endless line of Spectre/Meltdown patches needing the hosts to reboot in order to get this weeks firmware into the intel CPUs.
        • scurvy 7y ago
          This is what I was getting at. When Sun had issues with CPUs, they sent you new CPU boards and you could hot swap them live without downtime
          • zorked 7y ago
            That was indeed cool, but it also belongs to the "pet" phase of computing and this is the "cattle" age.
            • scurvy 7y ago
              Not really. It was done at scale, too. Hotmail replaced all of the faulty CPUs live.