...whatever provisions this proposed Unix system might provide for datacenter-level showstoppers. Take the following: I work for a contractor (non-IT) serving a major manufacturing outfit. About a month ago, the centralized SAP datacenter of the parent company somewhere in Switzerland suffered from a massive data corruption incident, resulting in a complete blackout of European outfits that lasted a little more than four days. Operations across the old continent came to a grinding halt as end-of-cycle data was attempted to sync to Switzerland to no avail, and the only outfits that could barely perform were those in Eastern Europe/Middle East where the otherwise despised practice of collecting everything at local and syncing in bulk (in this case a bloated web interface coupled with a local SQL server) saved the day. Not to mention all the workstation-level data crunching by the good old Excel in fact allowed for a quick recovery of Finance/QA/PP operations after the hiccup.
Now, the question remains is that whether a virtualization-based Unix solution can combat this effectively using triaged redundancy - which is expensive and could possibly turn hideously political - plus a gradual shift to better practices by replacing the inherently powerful workstation by easy-to-scram stuff that'll hopefully prevent a single dumb*** from taking down a whole datacenter, or whether it has some other secret weapon that I don't know of that'll mitigate the few instances where the availability of offline systems is the only way to sustain operations.
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