[ Thanks to Terry
Shannon for this link. ]
“Twenty years ago, VAXclusters were all the rage at Fermilabs,
Los Alamos National Labs, a number of US Department of Defense
three-letter agencies, not to mention a goodly number of large
corporations requiring mass quantities of computational horsepower
with excellent scalability and reliability.“But the times, they have a-changed. For a variety of reasons,
not the least of which was marketing malfeasance of Digital and the
rise of Sun Microsystems, VMS found itself edged out of the HPTC
market. One by one, VMS systems were displaced by UNIX systems in
commercial and government markets alike. DEC’s AltaVista, the
first–and in its day, the best search engine on the planet–was
powered by Digital UNIX. Celera Genomics relied on Digital
TruCluster technology until IBM came in and made Celera an offer it
couldn’t refuse: free top-of-the Regatta boxes running AIX.
Amazon.com, an erstwhile Digital UNIX marquee account, ditched its
enterprise-class AlphaServers and went with HP enterprise servers.
And eBay, for better or worse, runs on Sun UE10K high-end
enterprise servers using (when they are up and running) the Solaris
OS…”