Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
As mentioned in the section of this chapter on Oracle, in 2010, SAP lost a $1.3
billion copyright infringement suit filed by Oracle. There are still ongoing changes
and adjustments, so the litigation and final amounts may not yet be settled.
Tandem Computers
Tandem was founded in 1974 by Jimmy Treybig, James Katzman, and Michael
Green, with the help of the venture capitalist Jack Loustaunou and others in Cu-
pertino, California. The founders had worked for Hewlett-Packard and broached
their ideas for fault-tolerant computing but, at the time, HP was not interested.
The technical idea behind Tandem was important then and is still important
now. For many kinds of critical software packages such as ATMs, stock ex-
changes, telecommunications, and hospitals, failures and outages are disasters.
Tandem designed computers that were intended to operate in a nonstop mode
and to not fail. Obviously, to operate without failing, redundant components were
needed, along with a method of quickly switching from a failing component to an
alternate component without losing time or data.
Tandem carried redundancy to new heights. All of the components were re-
dundant and separate from each other so that the failure of any would not impact
the others. They communicated by sending messages back and forth.
Tandem also created a kind of monitor or watch-dog software feature that kept
track of the reliability of every component and issued warnings as soon as prob-
lems were detected.
In addition, Tandem developed methods of swapping out or changing compon-
ents while the rest of the computer continued to operate. These were important
concepts for computers and software that needed high reliability.
At the time Tandem was founded, computer reliability measured in terms of
mean time to failure (MTTF) and averaged only a few days. Tandem stretched out
the MTTF window by at least 100-fold.
The markets served by Tandem recognized the value of what they were doing,
and Tandem became a darling of Silicon Valley with one of the fastest ascents to
Fortune 500 status of any company.
Tandem also had an interesting corporate culture, which engendered both en-
thusiasm and loyalty among Tandem employees. (Tandem was one of my consult-
ing clients in the 1980s. The Tandem managers and technical personnel were very
enjoyable to work with, and all seemed very capable.)
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