Reliability, Availability And Serviceability

By Mike Workman, CEO, Pillar Data Systems

At a fundraising event a few months back at my son's high school, I spotted a ride in a restored WWII B-17 bomber in the silent auction. Being a nut for planes, especially military stuff, I had to bid on this. As luck and my wallet would have it, I won.

I'm a pilot, so naturally, flying, being in the air, and heights don't scare me. What did bother me was that this B-17 is 65 years old. This baby flew missions in the "The Big One," "Double U Double U Eye Eye" as they say. How on Earth could this plane still be airworthy? What about work hardening? Corrosion? Metal fatigue? I thought about all this while climbing aboard and trusting my life to a warplane built in 1943. It was a bit eerie, to say the least.

Well, the flight was awesome. Readers of this blog are well aware that I am a bit of a softie. I had tears well up in my eyes as I took my seat on the floor of this thing. Not for fear of malfunction or the air frame mind you, but in total awe at the engineering that went into building this machine so well. I just love building things, and being inside this wonderful, strong, practical machine 65 years after it rolled off the assembly line makes me proud of engineers around the world. All of them. Not to mention the history! It was like flying in a memorial to so many men and women, most of whom are no longer with us. And, the sound of those four big radial engines firing up just gave me goosebumps.

We belted into seats that were not much more than a stadium cushion to pad our rear ends from the cold aluminum floor. I was sandwiched between a 50 Caliber machine gun and the radio room. For take-off and landing, we had to be seated, but after that we were able to roam around the plane and sit in the bombardier's chair and check out the bombsite, check out the radio room, nose gunner's gun, and stick our heads out above the plane at 140 mph. Lots of hats have been lost trying this stunt. Luckily my Nikon D3 was strapped to my body securely – I could have towed the plane around the tarmac with that strap. If the air stream were to carry the camera away like some nitwit's hat, I was going with it.

When I started my engineering career at IBM, you might have thought the developers went to school with the designers of the B-17. No, not because they were old, but because they seemed to build things first and foremost to be reliable, always able to perform their intended function, and always repairable when they broke. At IBM, we built "RAS" (as it was referred to) into every design. Failover, redundancy, field replaceable units, MTBF, MTTR, and a host of other functions and metrics were always paramount.

Nobody would have considered designing a machine that couldn't be serviced from the front and rear of a rack, cables without retention clips, single points of failure, or forcing a technician to remove screws that could be dropped into the machine during a repair. Not that they didn't have issues with designs, the occasional spark plug that you couldn't get a wrench on without removing the air compressor sort of thing, but this was viewed as a flaw, not as a compromise.

We designed the Axiom in this spirit. Most enterprise products are designed in this way, but not all of them. Certainly, we have had to correct an issue uncovered here and there in the field, but rest assured the issues are looked at as RAS requirements and not "good enough" compromises. I am proud of the Axiom and its RAS characteristics. It may not earn Pillar the kind of distinction the ol' B-17 has earned itself and Boeing, but I like to think that the designers of B-17, the System 360, System 390, and the like would be proud of our accomplishments.

SOURCE: Pillar Data Systems