[Info-vax] The Future of Server Hardware?

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2012-10-01 19:21:22 +0000, David Froble said:

> Weren't racks of a "gazillion" DS10Ls a good solution for some 
> problems?   It seems that plenty of them were made and sold.

Yep.  I've built a number of those applications over the years, too.  
And you can power up and power down boxes as necessary, too; to easily 
size for the inevitable peaks and troughs in the load, and without 
keeping a ginormous mainframe-class box spun up and powered and cooled.

> Perhaps there are some applications better suited to many processors 
> than to just one or a few large processors ...

There are a number of applications that can be efficiently run in 
parallel.  As an example, mail and mailboxes.  You'd probably want or 
need a primary box and a shadow box (RAIS) for some number of users, 
but you don't need to to replicate everybody's mail data across a 
gazillion servers with the use of a directory that allows the mail to 
be routed to the appropriate server, and the user to be routed to the 
same server.  If you're smart about how you move your data around, and 
what data you replicate; replicating all the data makes less sense than 
replicating the directory.  You'll want to allow migration of the 
mailboxes around, too, which can mean you'll migrate the user's data 
close to the user's locality.

And for those cases where you need or want to distribute data or 
directory services, Google has top-flight clustering software, file 
systems and related tools.

If anybody is curious about how these apps can be built with available 
pieces (though not at Google-scale), see LDAP and DNS, among other 
tools.


-- 
Pure Personal Opinion | HoffmanLabs LLC