Notable Datacenter Technologies
I recently attended the Linux and Next Generation Data Center show in San Francisco. I saw some cool stuff and I’d like to hear from you about how it’s going with some of these products.
There was Amazon’s Computing (EC2) and Storage clouds, and their just announced messaging capability. Their prices look good and there’s much to recommend here. But I hear that you can’t get dedicated server names so that you can easily dedicate a service to a machine and communicate, thus making it harder to build well-structured architectures. Is this true? Anyone have experiences using Amazon for non-trivial site?
There was an interesting terabyte memory server that could function as a sort of huge RAM disc from Violin Scalable Memory. This could be useful in certain apps that develop large and transient memory stores. It’s not good for disk swapping despite what their literature says, simply because if you are designing something that ends up swapping you’ve made a huge mistake — stop it! But this could be really useful for improving the speed of systems that need lots of caching, and in web-based systems this could be a plus. The key thing here is the cost of this versus an array commodity servers and fast ram… Opinions?
Spent a bit of time looking at Cleversafe which has a data dispersion and redundancy scheme that shares aspects of the Google File System and Sharding goals. Google is solving the challenges of providing rapid and robust access to very large data sets that will not fit on a single machine. Google relies on multiple copies of date for reliability. Cleversafe is focused on the distribution and reliability of a dataset while providing elements of security. They break up data in an algorithmic way so that it can be reconstructed from other available data, as opposed to keeping simple copies around. I’m not really clear on the importance of this feature, given that disc space is so cheap and continues to fall daily. But as a technology this stuff is (pardon) clever.
There was a lot of virtualization hype. This is plainly the low-hanging marketing push of moment, for the benefits are rather proven and well known. Nothing much new here though.
Tags: Technical
2 responses so far ↓
1 Paul // Sep 4, 2007 at 12:29 pm
I couldn’t find any information about the “just announced messaging capability†you mentioned regarding Amazon’s Web Services. I’m aware of the SQS part of Amazon’s services, but I wondered if you could direct me to any new info that details or describes this new capability.
2 jeffrey // Sep 6, 2007 at 3:55 pm
Yes it is SQS. For more info you can try one of their “web services evangelists” (i hate that term): Mike Culver, mculver at amazon.com.