Subject: Re: [vserver] vserver scalability
From: Gordan Bobic <gordan@bobich.net>
Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2010 11:44:03 +0100

On 06/17/2010 10:39 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 10:57:53AM +0200, Andre Timmermann wrote:
>
>>> Something which can be adressed with SSDs.
>>
>> Of course this can be addressed with SSDs. Unfortunately they are VERY
>> expensive right now, so it is simply not economically advantageous.
>
> It is possible to have the both of the worlds with hybrid filesystems.
> Btrfs could be one eventually, and there's a rudimentary zfs port
> for Linux in the works. No idea which will make the cut first.
>
> Of course you could export a hybrid zfs pool as an iSCSI target,
> but this runs contrary to my philosophy (achieving high peformance
> and availability economically, by using lots of cheap, high-efficiency
> hardware -- the current sweet spot is currently Supermicro/Atom, but
> I'm hoping for ARM).

Tell me about it. I really want a Cortex A9 *TX motherboard with DIMM 
sockets. There are a few out there that sport PCI/PCIe slots, but the 
closest I could find still only has soldered-on RAM (512MB) with no DIMM 
sockets for increasing it. :-(

If you find some that tick that last box, I'd very much like to hear 
about it. I've actually considered seeing what it would cost to get a 
custom motherboard made in a small production run (say, 1,000 units), 
but to do it from scratch would take a lot of R&D (expensive), and I 
doubt the manufacturer of the 512MB board would consider producing a 
modified version for such a small run (most ARM stuff is built in 
mind-boggling volumes for the embedded market).

Gordan