> No, that is the whole point of the "Nobody got fired for buying IBM" meme. If you buy IBM and it fails, even your corporate, non-tech boss knows (or believes)

> No, that is the whole point of the "Nobody got fired for buying IBM" meme. If you buy IBM and it fails, even your corporate, non-tech boss knows (or believes) that you couldn't have done any better than what you did. "Nobody got fired for buying IBM" isn't a meme, it's an IBM marketing slogan. In real life your boss cares a lot more about whether something failed on your watch than why. > It doesn't make sense to say that the solution to failures is to not have any. It does when the open source solutions have a lower failure rate because they're more widely used, better tested and less "integrated" which dramatically increases flexibility in quickly implementing solutions to unforeseen problems. It also leaves more budget for real improvements, because RAID6 with a hot spare on commodity hardware costs less than RAID5 with no spare from "enterprise" vendors. Reliability engineering is science. Hardware will fail. Software will fail. So you include redundancy for the hardware with the highest failure rates, use more redundancy for systems with higher importance, and use modular widely-available commodity parts that can be quickly replaced and sourced from multiple independent vendors. For systems with even higher availability requirements, use system-level redundancy and keep regular snapshots on access-restricted independent backup systems, etc. Money spent actually preventing failures is more effective than money spent to acquire a scapegoat.