Gear6 satiates hungry apps with 500GB RAM monster

Gear6 fits into that elite, blissful class of start-ups that have an easy to digest premise and infrastructure-friendly gear. The Silicon Valley-based firm ships a pair of caching appliances. These RAM-based boxes plug right into existing Ethernet networks and work as complements to disk-based shared storage systems. As a …

[Anonymous Coward]

Reminds me of my dissertation...

Reminds me of my dissertation many years ago; wrote something similar on a network of sun's; something went wrong, process table filled up (fast) on every server (it was only meant to take a small bit from each machine).

I wasn't very popular when every terminal ground to a shuddering halt...

Wonder if they've got some form of RAID happening on the servers? Since the unit has 4 x86's in it, what'll happen if one of them fails? Could be quite a slowdown when the system needs to load in 500/4 GB of data in from some disks somewhere...

[Daniel Ballado-Torres]

Nice but...

Have they thought about a small thing: blackouts.

If RAM loses power, all your data goes poof. NAND Flash memories and such at least have some kind of persistence, RAM doesn't. Ow.

[Jan-Erik Finnberg]

Re: RAM losing power

I'm pretty sure they have thought of that. It's pretty much RAM's only weakness.

It's easy to add batteries that keep the data safe for a few hours in case of a power outage. And this thing is a cache, I'm sure it writes up-to-date data continuously to the backing non-volatile storage system.

[Micha Roon]

There are not only OLTP systems

This could give a big performance boost to any datawarehouse and reporting application.

I know of a couple guys who'd drool if they were told that it's no problem to drill down to posting levels in their accounting system. Today, with nearly 100 mio postings a day, this is not possible.

and by the way: no gives a shit about blackouts in a DW application. nothing's stored anyway.