Re: What O/S or hardware feature would be useful for databases?

On 07/03/07 13:03, Merlin Moncure wrote:
> On 7/2/07, Ron Johnson <ron.l.johnson@cox.net> wrote:
>> On 06/18/07 08:05, Merlin Moncure wrote:
>> [snip]
>> >
>> > That being said, it's pretty clear to me we are in the last days of
>> > the disk drive.
>>
>> Oh, puhleeze.  Seagate, Hitachi, Fuji and WD aren't sitting around
>> with their thumbs up their arses.    In 3-4 years, large companies
>> and spooky TLAs will be stuffing SANs with hundreds of 2TB drives.
>
> haven't we had this debate before?
>
> I don't know if you've been paying attention to what's going on in the
> storage industry...Apple, Dell, Fuji, Sandisk, Intel, and others are
> all making strategic plays in the flash market.  At the outset of
> 2007, flash was predicted to decline 50% for the year...so far, prices
> have dropped 65% in the first two quarters.  Right now it's all about
> the high end notebooks and media players but the high margin, high
> rotation speed drives are next.

Technological nay-sayers have been wrong before, but I just can't
see a *database* server full of static RAM in the next 10 years.

>                                  I admit the high density low speed
> cold storage d2d backup systems will be the last to fall and will be
> quite some ways off.
>
> note by, 'next', and 'last days', i mean that pretty loosely...within
> the next 5 years or so.  'dead' as well...there are many stages of
> death to an enterprise legacy product.  I consider tape backups to be
> nearly dead already, although there are many still in use.  d2d is
> where it's at though.

Mainframers (and various other oldsters like me) think about
1) shock resistance,
2) media costs,
3) Iron Mountain,
4) media longevity.

You can drop a SuperDLT tape from "man height" and recover the data
(even if it has to be restrung into a new housing).  I wouldn't drop
a disk full of data and have any expectation of survival.

A 160GB ("320"GB compressed) SATA drive is about $60 plus a $10
carrier.  That comparable very well to tapes, I think.

An Iron Mountain delivery truck will drive over some nasty bumps.
How shock resistant is a disk drive in an external carrier?  Not as
resistant as a drive in a padded shipping box.  But is it resistant
"enough"?

"Enterprise-level" tapes can sit in storage for 7-15 years and then
still be readable.  Can a disk drive sit un-used for 7 years?  Would
the motor freeze up?  Will we still be able to connect SATA drives
in 7 years?

--
Ron Johnson, Jr.
Jefferson LA  USA

Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day.
Hit him with a fish, and he goes away for good!