Right, but look at what Google do, their boxes are basically disposable. Why invest in dual-redundant-hotswappable-everything boxes when you just throw the entire thing away if any bit of it breaks, 'cos it's cheaper to replace it than to even try to repair it in-place.
> Right, but look at what Google do, their boxes are basically disposable
We're talking matter of degree.
The claim was that building a search engine out of 90s sparcs meant that you didn't have to worry about things dying.
That claim is not true - reasonable search engines of that era required enough machines that the failure rate of 90s sparcs, while better than x86 of the time, was enough to require folks to handle frequent failures.
It's reasonable to argue that the cost/benefit tradeoff of sparc's extra reliability vs x85 wasn't worth it for those companies, but that's a different argument.
