Re: [ANNOUNCE] Ramback: faster than a speeding bullet

[Ric Wheeler <ric@emc.com>]

Daniel Phillips wrote:
> On Thursday 13 March 2008 06:27, Ric Wheeler wrote:
>>>>> So "perfectly reliable if UPS power does not fail" seems a bit over the
>>>>> top.
>>>> It works for EMC :-)
>>> Where they control the hardware and run a rather specialized OS as well,
>>> not a general purpose system like Linux on "commodity" hardware ;-)
>> Actually, in Centera we use generic hardware with a fairly normal kernel 
>> which has strategic backports from upstream (libata, nic drivers, etc).
>>
>> No UPS in the picture.  Data integrity is protected by working with the 
>> application team to insure they understand when data is safely on the 
>> disk platter and working with IO & FS people to try and make sure we 
>> don't lie to them (too much ) about that promise.
>>
>> The centera boxes are tested with power failure & error injection and by 
>> all of our customers in all those ways customers do ;-)
> 
> Hi Ric,
> 
> Right, so Linux has gotten to the point where it competes with purpose-
> built embedded software in reliability.  Not quite there, but close
> enough for mission-critical.

This is our case, but we have been working for quite a while to enhance 
the reliability of the io stack & file systems. It also helps to be very 
careful to select hardware components with mature, open source & 
natively integrated drivers ;-)


> 
> I was not thinking of Centera when I mentioned the UPS though...
> 
> Daniel

No problem, we certainly have many boxes with built in ups hardware ;-)

ric