Given that ZFS was developed and trademarked by Sun, on what grounds does Netapp have any leg to stand on here? This is crazy.
NetApp aren't disputing that Sun developed ZFS or have a trademark on the name. This is a patent case that alleges Sun, in developing the ZFS implementation have violated patents that NetApp holds on technologies. Sure, don't RTFA, but try getting to the end of the summary.
I don't get why you wouldn't have dual-redundant power supplies on all devices (routers, switches, servers),
Seems like a design flaw here and/or someone was just being cheap.
It would be the latter. The AWS EC2 instances aren't marketed or intended to be high availability individually. They're designed to be cheap and Amazon do say instances will fail. They provide a good number of data centres and specifically say that systems within the same zone may fail - different data centres are entirely independent. They provide a number of extra services that can also tolerate the loss of one data centre.
Anybody who believes they're getting highly available instances hasn't done a basic level of research about the platform they're using and deserves to be bitten by this. Anybody who does know the basics of the platform will know the risks and will be able to recover from a failure, possibly even seamlessly.
While they're not your every day laptop, there are some people out there who have a use for them. Once, while working in a computer repair shop back in 2002, a customer came in with a very battered old Toughbook. As it turned out, it really had been through a warzone, as he'd been a journalist in Afghanistan during the invasion and it'd been his companion for the last year or two.
Despite its appearance, the hardware was working perfectly - more than can be said for the Windows install on it.
Kleeneness is next to Godelness.
