Gregory's Server
Founded in 1974, Tandem Computers was a leader in high-availability computing. For decades, if you had an application that absolutely could not tolerate unplanned downtime -- a bank, a stock exchange, a telephone network -- Tandem's "NonStop" computers were aimed at you.
NonStop machines achieved reliability through massive hardware redundancy. A NonStop computer was a cluster of computing modules, each with its own processors, memory, disks. A failure in one couldn't affect the others.
Redundancy made Tandem. So naturally, when they made some coffee mugs, it was important that they feature redundancy too.
Founded in 1974, Tandem Computers was a leader in high-availability computing. For decades, if you had an application that absolutely could not tolerate unplanned downtime -- a bank, a stock exchange, a telephone network -- Tandem's "NonStop" computers were aimed at you.
NonStop machines achieved reliability through massive hardware redundancy. A NonStop computer was a cluster of computing modules, each with its own processors, memory, disks. A failure in one couldn't affect the others.
@jalefkowit Around time of the failed ports of NSK to Alpha and then to Itanium, the redundancy switched from being hardware lockstep to firmware. (None of the commodity processors support lockstep.)
The NSK product line and most of the HP “server” business (and whatever little was left of DEC) was eventually ceded to HPE.
Here is some info on the post-Tandem-hardware commodity designs, from 2008:
http://www.availabilitydigest.com/public_articles/0308/ns_blades.pdf
@jalefkowit I was at Compaq during the Tandem merger.
I thought we all were getting free or discounted dual stick popsicles.
@jalefkowit
I encountered Tandem during my 6+ year tenure in the banking industry. Some banks in my country still use these systems, because of the high reliability required.