I have often said that certain products carry with them what I call “Alignment of the Planets” reliability. This means that you would blame everything in the computer room–including the alignment of the planets–before you blame the particular system. Having started my professional computing career on the Burroughs A Series systems, I learned that Burroughs (now Unisys) designed software that just worked. Of course, no software is perfect, but it was designed with an expectation of working well, not the too common expectation of today where we assume the system will fail. The has become a standard expectation of computer people and unfortunately, this attitude has permeated software development. Another product I feel has this level of reliability is the BigIP line of Web Application Front-ends from F5 Networks. I have been doing quite a bit of development in iRules on the bigIP platform and it is just a great box. As I said before, nothing is perfect, but the odds of a problem actually beng causes by the bigIP are remote in my experience. More on iRules later.