3 ms·

I was under the impression that AOL was a big Tandem shop at one point, was that not the case?

bradknowles 3y ago
We did have some Tandem hardware, but at that time Tandem couldn't really deliver on the SMP needs that we had, whereas Stratus could. I have heard at least three of the "core four" founders talk about how they had used Tandem at a previous job where they had worked together and got seriously burned by the vendor, and that's why they went with Stratus at what later became known as AOL. Tandem was finally allowed to come into the company later, but had a relatively small part to play. At least, that's the way it was when I left in 1997. I can't speak for what happened after I left.
- Sylamore 3y ago
  Thanks for the insight, when I was with DTV our HP/Tandem rep always made a big deal about their footprint in AOL in what would have been the same time era you were there (mid 90s) and how they "created the internet you know today" but they always sounded more like sales guy tall tales than anything else. We kept their footprint constrained to database caches (effectively) because our Superdome couldn't handle the dual workload of Siebel and lots of read requests from APIs, which was a role they excelled at for us.
  - bradknowles 3y ago
    Putting SQL engines right on the drive arrays was a pretty cool idea. That let you offload a lot of I/O to the lowest level hardware that you could. That was a real mainframe-class trick. Sadly, Tandem didn't seem to be able to deliver much else for us. Database-wise, AOL decided to go with Sybase as the official company-wide solution. Don't know whose palms got greased on that one, but I could have lived with Sybase if that was the only problem. No, AOL then had to decide who was going to be their sole database hardware provider, and they selected SGI for that. Now, SGI had some great hardware at that time, but databases is not something they did well. And SGI was not a principal hardware platform for Sybase, so everything that was developed had to wait another six months or so to be ported from the main hardware platforms over to SGI. And that's assuming it got ported at all. And that's what was chosen as the infrastructure for implementing the new version of the AOL mail system that lived outside of Stratus -- Sybase on SGI. I could have lived with a database-backed mailbox store for the entire service, but only if it wasn't done using the combined shitshow of Sybase on SGI.

We did have some Tandem hardware, but at that time Tandem couldn't really deliver on the SMP needs that we had, whereas Stratus could. I have heard at least three of the "core four" founders talk about how they had used Tandem at a previous job where they had worked together and got seriously burned by the vendor, and that's why they went with Stratus at what later became known as AOL. Tandem was finally allowed to come into the company later, but had a relatively small part to play. At least, that's the way it was when I left in 1997. I can't speak for what happened after I left.

Sylamore 3y ago
Thanks for the insight, when I was with DTV our HP/Tandem rep always made a big deal about their footprint in AOL in what would have been the same time era you were there (mid 90s) and how they "created the internet you know today" but they always sounded more like sales guy tall tales than anything else. We kept their footprint constrained to database caches (effectively) because our Superdome couldn't handle the dual workload of Siebel and lots of read requests from APIs, which was a role they excelled at for us.
- bradknowles 3y ago
  Putting SQL engines right on the drive arrays was a pretty cool idea. That let you offload a lot of I/O to the lowest level hardware that you could. That was a real mainframe-class trick. Sadly, Tandem didn't seem to be able to deliver much else for us. Database-wise, AOL decided to go with Sybase as the official company-wide solution. Don't know whose palms got greased on that one, but I could have lived with Sybase if that was the only problem. No, AOL then had to decide who was going to be their sole database hardware provider, and they selected SGI for that. Now, SGI had some great hardware at that time, but databases is not something they did well. And SGI was not a principal hardware platform for Sybase, so everything that was developed had to wait another six months or so to be ported from the main hardware platforms over to SGI. And that's assuming it got ported at all. And that's what was chosen as the infrastructure for implementing the new version of the AOL mail system that lived outside of Stratus -- Sybase on SGI. I could have lived with a database-backed mailbox store for the entire service, but only if it wasn't done using the combined shitshow of Sybase on SGI.