Re: 1 TB of memory

On Fri, 2006-03-17 at 15:28, Merlin Moncure wrote:
> On 3/17/06, Luke Lonergan <llonergan(at)greenplum(dot)com> wrote:
> > > Now what happens as soon as you start doing random I/O? :)
> > If you are accessing 3 rows at a time from among billions, the problem you
> > have is mostly access time - so an SSD might be very good for some OLTP
> > applications. However - the idea of putting Terabytes of data into an SSD
> > through a thin straw of a channel is silly.
>
> I'll 'byte' on this..right now the price for gigabyte of ddr ram is
> hovering around 60$/gigabyte. If you conveniently leave aside the
> problem of making ddr ram fault tolerant vs making disks tolerant, you
> are getting 10 orders of magnitude faster seek time and unlimited
> bandwidth...at least from the physical device. While SANs are getting
> cheaper they are still fairly expensive at 1-5$/gigabyte depending on
> various factors. You can do the same tricks on SSD storage as with
> disks.
>
> SSD storage is 1-2k$/gigabyte currently, but I think there is huge
> room to maneuver price-wise after the major players recoup their
> investments and market forces kick in. IMO this process is already in
> play and the next cycle of hardware upgrades in the enterprise will be
> updating critical servers with SSD storage. Im guessing by as early
> 2010 a significant percentage of enterpise storage will be SSD of some
> flavor.

Now I'm envisioning building something with commodity 1U servers hold 4
to 16 gigs ram, and interconnected with 1g or 10g ethernet.

Open Source SSD via iSCSI with commodity hardware... hmmm. sounds like
a useful project.