3 ms·

I was very unsurprised to see that this history starts a bit late. In 1992 I was working on HACMP/6000, which was a high-availability clustering product for IBM

I was very unsurprised to see that this history starts a bit late. In 1992 I was working on HACMP/6000, which was a high-availability clustering product for IBM's AIX (though I worked at a company that was on contract to them). Databases were a primary use case, relying on shared storage instead of replication. We were hardly the first into that space BTW. DEC in particular had developed a lot of the concepts (e.g. locking models) that we and others at the time emulated, and the history in this space goes back even further than them. Were those systems as scalable as what we have now, or even as robust? Nowhere even close. But the erasure of that history still irks me. Modern distributed databases (and distributed systems in general) in their turn relied heavily on experience and concepts from those earlier systems, but rarely acknowledge the fact.

macintux 5y ago
Tandem started selling their NonStop systems in the mid-70s, so clearly high availability was important. At Basho we worked hard to acknowledge our debt to distributed systems pioneers. Not everyone is ignorant of that history.
- notacoward 5y ago
  Yup, the Basho folks were/are very good about that. BTW hi, we've quite likely met, though I don't know which Basho alum you are. ;) And yes, even I was a pretty late entrant to the HA game. I never worked on Tandem systems, but I worked with Tandem people at the job I mentioned, after having worked with both Stratus and Sequoia systems previously. Those were all FT rather than HA, but the point remains that work on making systems survive failures through redundancy goes back much further than the OP mentions.
  - macintux 5y ago
    Oh, definitely, was trying to add to rather than detract from your point. I was mainly on the periphery at Basho, started as tech evangelist, migrated to engineering to help get 2.0 out the door. John Daily.
- bogomipz 5y ago
  I always thought Basho was a great company with a great product. I felt like I learned a lot through Basho documentation. I never really understood what happened to the company though as it seemed highly regarded amongst the dev community as well and Riak was always mentioned in the same sentence as the other distributed data stores at that time.
  - macintux 5y ago
    Tough market, limited potential customer base for such a specialized tool, some product/release planning issues with Riak 2.0, and ownership structure that didn’t make anything easy at the end (but I’m far from an expert on this topic, especially the last one, just parroting distant memories). Engineering was very talented, and the customer support team was truly top notch. Such a shame, best job I’ve ever had.
jlokier 5y ago
High-availability database systems go back to 1974 or so, with Tandem Computers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandem_Computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandem_Computers "Tandem's NonStop systems use a number of independent identical processors and redundant storage devices and controllers to provide automatic high-speed "failover" in the case of a hardware or software failure. To contain the scope of failures and of corrupted data, these multi-computer systems have no shared central components, not even main memory. Conventional multi-computer systems all use shared memories and work directly on shared data objects. Instead, NonStop processors cooperate by exchanging messages across a reliable fabric, and software takes periodic snapshots for possible rollback of program memory state." The general ideas of failover for high-availbility go back much further. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failover https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failover "The term "failover", although probably in use by engineers much earlier, can be found in a 1962 declassified NASA report. The term "switchover" can be found in the 1950s when describing '"Hot" and "Cold" Standby Systems', with the current meaning of immediate switchover to a running system (hot) and delayed switchover to a system that needs starting (cold). A conference proceedings from 1957 describes computer systems with both Emergency Switchover (i.e. failover) and Scheduled Failover (for maintenance)." Also worth a mention that the well known Paxos distributed consensus algorithm was described in a 1989 paper by Leslie Lamport, and the almost identical (but less well known) predecessor Viewstamped Replication in a 1988 thesis by Brian Oki.
- _vvhw 5y ago
  I had the recent privilege of interviewing Brian Oki [1] of Viewstamped Replication in September last year, since VSR is the consensus protocol that we use in TigerBeetle [2] to process a million financial transactions per second. One of the first things that Brian Oki mentioned was Tandem NonStop, and I understand that Brian's VSR was then the first consensus protocol to deal with network partitions, where the network is not reliable, for high availability. What was also special was that James Cowling joined me afterwards—we covered Viewstamped Replication Revisited, the 2012 revision, with a focus in both interviews on Barbara Liskov's influence on both James and Brian. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ps106zjmjhw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ps106zjmjhw [2] https://www.tigerbeetle.com https://www.tigerbeetle.com
cbm-vic-20 5y ago
Here's a link to a PDF of the September 1987 issue of the Digital Technical Journal, which was all about clustering on the VAX/VMS machines. https://vmssoftware.com/docs/dtj-v01-05-sep1987.pdf https://vmssoftware.com/docs/dtj-v01-05-sep1987.pdf
pinewurst 5y ago
Not only late, but strangely Google-centric as though we lived in caves before the Google monolith appeared.
icedchai 5y ago
Yes, there wasn't much "history" there. I worked on an AIX system that used HACMP. Before that, I used Veritas clustering and file system on Suns. Prior to that, I was at a VMS shop that made use of DEC's built in clustering.

macintux 5y ago

Tandem started selling their NonStop systems in the mid-70s, so clearly high availability was important. At Basho we worked hard to acknowledge our debt to distributed systems pioneers. Not everyone is ignorant of that history.

notacoward 5y ago
Yup, the Basho folks were/are very good about that. BTW hi, we've quite likely met, though I don't know which Basho alum you are. ;) And yes, even I was a pretty late entrant to the HA game. I never worked on Tandem systems, but I worked with Tandem people at the job I mentioned, after having worked with both Stratus and Sequoia systems previously. Those were all FT rather than HA, but the point remains that work on making systems survive failures through redundancy goes back much further than the OP mentions.
- macintux 5y ago
  Oh, definitely, was trying to add to rather than detract from your point. I was mainly on the periphery at Basho, started as tech evangelist, migrated to engineering to help get 2.0 out the door. John Daily.
bogomipz 5y ago
I always thought Basho was a great company with a great product. I felt like I learned a lot through Basho documentation. I never really understood what happened to the company though as it seemed highly regarded amongst the dev community as well and Riak was always mentioned in the same sentence as the other distributed data stores at that time.
- macintux 5y ago
  Tough market, limited potential customer base for such a specialized tool, some product/release planning issues with Riak 2.0, and ownership structure that didn’t make anything easy at the end (but I’m far from an expert on this topic, especially the last one, just parroting distant memories). Engineering was very talented, and the customer support team was truly top notch. Such a shame, best job I’ve ever had.

jlokier 5y ago

High-availability database systems go back to 1974 or so, with Tandem Computers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandem_Computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandem_Computers "Tandem's NonStop systems use a number of independent identical processors and redundant storage devices and controllers to provide automatic high-speed "failover" in the case of a hardware or software failure. To contain the scope of failures and of corrupted data, these multi-computer systems have no shared central components, not even main memory. Conventional multi-computer systems all use shared memories and work directly on shared data objects. Instead, NonStop processors cooperate by exchanging messages across a reliable fabric, and software takes periodic snapshots for possible rollback of program memory state." The general ideas of failover for high-availbility go back much further. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failover https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failover "The term "failover", although probably in use by engineers much earlier, can be found in a 1962 declassified NASA report. The term "switchover" can be found in the 1950s when describing '"Hot" and "Cold" Standby Systems', with the current meaning of immediate switchover to a running system (hot) and delayed switchover to a system that needs starting (cold). A conference proceedings from 1957 describes computer systems with both Emergency Switchover (i.e. failover) and Scheduled Failover (for maintenance)." Also worth a mention that the well known Paxos distributed consensus algorithm was described in a 1989 paper by Leslie Lamport, and the almost identical (but less well known) predecessor Viewstamped Replication in a 1988 thesis by Brian Oki.

_vvhw 5y ago
I had the recent privilege of interviewing Brian Oki [1] of Viewstamped Replication in September last year, since VSR is the consensus protocol that we use in TigerBeetle [2] to process a million financial transactions per second. One of the first things that Brian Oki mentioned was Tandem NonStop, and I understand that Brian's VSR was then the first consensus protocol to deal with network partitions, where the network is not reliable, for high availability. What was also special was that James Cowling joined me afterwards—we covered Viewstamped Replication Revisited, the 2012 revision, with a focus in both interviews on Barbara Liskov's influence on both James and Brian. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ps106zjmjhw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ps106zjmjhw [2] https://www.tigerbeetle.com https://www.tigerbeetle.com

cbm-vic-20 5y ago

Here's a link to a PDF of the September 1987 issue of the Digital Technical Journal, which was all about clustering on the VAX/VMS machines. https://vmssoftware.com/docs/dtj-v01-05-sep1987.pdf https://vmssoftware.com/docs/dtj-v01-05-sep1987.pdf

pinewurst 5y ago

Not only late, but strangely Google-centric as though we lived in caves before the Google monolith appeared.

icedchai 5y ago

Yes, there wasn't much "history" there. I worked on an AIX system that used HACMP. Before that, I used Veritas clustering and file system on Suns. Prior to that, I was at a VMS shop that made use of DEC's built in clustering.