Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods (2013)
It&#x27;s a step backwards that distribution is being dealt with at the application level. Tandem Computers [1] had distribution at the OS and database level working well in the 1980s.  The technology is still available from HP.<p>Tandem&#x27;s NonStop OS is fundamentally different from UNIX-like OSs. UNIX is a time-sharing system with a file system. NonStop is a transaction system with a database system. There&#x27;s very little state outside the database. 
Programs are started, do one transaction, and exit. If there&#x27;s a problem during a transaction, the entire transaction aborts and does not commit.<p>Tandem was running an average system uptime of about 10 years across their installed base, with the main cause of failure being human errors during hardware maintenance. One of their people wrote a paper on how to get the uptime up to 50 years.  Tandem&#x27;s own hardware had heavy self-checking. The goal was to detect errors and abort, not fix them. Failing a transaction would result in a fallover to the paired backup machine, which would result in a retry and recovery.<p>Tandem&#x27;s main problem was high hardware cost; you needed several of anything.  Also, because of a series of acquisitions, the system had to be ported from Tandem to MIPS to Alpha to HP-RISC to Itanium to, finally, x86. X86 lacks the checking hardware, so it&#x27;s not as good for this.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tandem_Computers" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tandem_Computers</a>