TheSysAdminLog » High Availability http://thesysadminlog.com Wed, 10 Feb 2010 04:14:14 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Is There a Market for No-Reboot Linux? Of Course! http://thesysadminlog.com/high-availability/is-there-a-market-for-no-reboot-linux-of-course/ http://thesysadminlog.com/high-availability/is-there-a-market-for-no-reboot-linux-of-course/#comments Wed, 10 Feb 2010 04:14:14 +0000 Wyatt Walter http://thesysadminlog.com/?p=43 With the announcement that Ksplice is now offering its pay-for service for Red Hat, Ubuntu (LTS), CentOS, and a few other Linux distros allowing no-reboot updates to the Linux kernel, a lot of people have been wondering whether or not there was a real market. Of course, if you really care about uptime, you can tolerate the failure or reboot of a system (because there’s another one to take it’s place, not because downtime is tolerable). That works for systems in the large all right (they could still benefit), but gets a bit interesting in the small.

In smaller, lower budget systems, this product could be a life-saver. When admins are crunched for time and services aren’t redundant (as is the case when purchasing single dedicated servers with commodity hosting services, which really are massive amounts of smaller environments), reboots are a pain and can create extra maintenance windows. Saving an admin from having to schedule downtime in the middle of the night for $4/month is completely worth it.

What Ksplice doesn’t provide (and some people seem to think it will help) is any sort of high availability. Just because kernel and system upgrades can be completed without a reboot, it doesn’t mean that it helps with preventing downtime. It can, however, prevent planned downtime for maintenance which is a welcome change to any sysadmin.

]]> http://thesysadminlog.com/high-availability/is-there-a-market-for-no-reboot-linux-of-course/feed/ 0