Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 20 Oct 2003 19:29:03 +0100 | From | John Bradford <> | Subject | RE: Blockbusting news, this is important (Re: Why are bad disk se ctors numbered strangely, and what happens to them?) |
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Quote from David Lang <david.lang@digitalinsight.com>: > rotating storage is hitting $1 per gig, memory is running ~$100/gig > (substantially more for the highest density memory) > > making a small solid state drive is easy, cheap and definantly has some > uses, but making something that will replace stacks of 300G drives is > neither cheap or easy.
Maybe one day local non-volitile storage won't even matter.
For example, say you were setting up a, (partial), mirror of kernel.org.
If you already had several machines in a datacentre, you could install another one with no disks at all, just 4 GB of RAM, and configure it to boot over the lan, loading the root filesystem in to a ramdisk.
Once booted, it could retrieve the parts of kernel.org that you wanted to serve from a trusted mirror site, and begin serving.
Other such machines could use your machine as a trusted mirror site, and eventually you could have lots of these machines all holding their partial mirror of kernel.org in RAM.
As long as there is at least one on-line, any others can go down and come up, and it doesn\'t really matter - they will just re-sync with another node.
Of course, this would use up a lot of network bandwidth, but in the future that may not matter.
Or, a more practical usage would be a load balanced cluster of webservers - why bother with non-volitile storage in all of them? Some of them could serve entirely from RAM, having booted over the LAN.
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