It's really fun to recover a system that's designed to never go down. Some years ago I was working with Tandem/Compaq and they had a web server on the NonStop H

It's really fun to recover a system that's designed to never go down. Some years ago I was working with Tandem/Compaq and they had a web server on the NonStop Himalaya platform. Long story short, said server had its first experience with real world web traffic at scale when we were delivering coverage of an international sporting event, and Things Went Poorly. The onsite Tandem engineers had never been faced with a NonStop setup that just...stopped (actually it was worse than that). Bear in mind this was the company that used to do demos by randomly unplugging hardware and the transactions kept chugging along. We ended up punting coverage to a smaller flat version of the site served off Compaqs running IIS while we cleaned up the mess. Now, Tandem shouldn't feel bad. After all, Cisco had guys in the hosting facility trying to keep the then-new PIX series up and running.