RE: Blockbusting news, this is important (Re: Why are bad disk se ctors numbered strangely, and what happens to them?)

[John Bradford]

Quote from David Lang <david.lang@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> 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.

John.
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