Re: [ANNOUNCE] Ramback: faster than a speeding bullet

From: Daniel Phillips
Date: Mon Mar 31 2008 - 07:39:44 EST


On Tuesday 18 March 2008 06:57, Alan Cox wrote:
> > If the primary server goes down then we lose exactly one interesting
> > data element stored only in its memory: the ramdisk dirty map. Though
> > we could be much cleverer, the backup server will simply set its entire
> > map to dirty when it takes over, and will duly sync back the entire
> > ramdisk to media a few minutes later.
>
> Assuming the 1010 has proper power isolation that makes sense and would
> give you pretty much what was wanted. Especially as you can replace the
> secondary server with a small system which does *nothing* but sync the
> ramdisk back and so is far less likely to crash.

The 1010 just has power rails that connect to dual power supplies if
that is what you mean.

> Does make you wonder why its not built into the violin ;)

Perhaps adding what amounts to a server motherboard did not make sense,
when an external server can already do the job. I don't know, there is
a certain purity in the JBOM concept (just a box of memory), and no
doubt they were able to bring this beast to market earlier because of
it.

I would be far from surprised to see a later incarnation incorporate a
hard disk. Did I mention it already has Linux running inside it to do
the raid management etc?

Regards,

Daniel
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/