On Thu, 28 Mar 2002, Chris Lamb wrote:
Yes, it is a fundamental law of computing that files and databases will always expand to fill the available disk space, but why is it that you can't even buy a 9GB drive anymore? A 20-30GB database, even if you double or triple it in size, is still going to fit on *one* shelf with 9- or 18GB drives.
Going *way* out into fantasyland here: what we need are PCMCIA-sized 1-inch drives. Not like the kind you see today... these ones would have a single, tiny platter spinning at 30000 rpm with an FC-AL interface. A 2U-tall enclosure could fit 72 of those across a 19" face with some room to spare. Break that up into 5 14-disk RAID groups and 2 hot spares. If each disk is 4GB, you end up with about 230GB of useable space. Not very dense, but super-high spindle speeds and lots of them. Lots of blinkenlights too. ;-)
A long time ago I was going to recommend that filers come with a pair of internal boot drives - like a mirrored pair of 4GB or 9GB drives _strictly_ for use as the boot volume, with some space for logs, etc.
You'd lose the ability to cluster then, since the partner will not have access to those drives. I suppose you could have internal mirrored drives (plus a spare), and split them like the NVRAM. Writes would then be mirrored to both local and partner drives. However, that's a backwards step from eventualy filer/storage virtualization. It doesn't make much sense to have significant storage physically tied to a filer head when you move to N+1 clustering, a SAN fabric between filer heads and the drive pool, etc. Being able to boot off of a flash image (like on the F880 and newer models) seems like the right way to go though.