Lynn Wheeler wrote: > so the issue is effectively how fast fault isolation/recovery/tolerant > technology becomes commodized. this is somewhat the scenario that > happened with RAID ... when they first appeared, they were frequently > depreciated compared to "mainframe" DASD ... but since then, they've > effectively turned into the standard.
I believe so. The parallel with the RAID experience is pretty striking and ought to be sobering. GOOGLE, Yahoo, Amazon and others of their ilk are really pushing the envelope with their focus on low-cost. That approach has taken them in some surprising directions in terms of their use of (data/function) duplication and redundancy and the associated impacts on traditional OLTP thinking. Of course, if you're indexing the entire internet those low-cost thingies can still add up to big numbers, but it would be a mistake (IMO) to assume we could to it any cheaper/more efficiently with a traditional mainframe-based system design. It might be possible, but there are reasons to think it might not go well for the traditionalists. Pat Helland (formerly with Tandem and MS, now with Amazon) has written some very lucid and entertaining discussions about how economics are changing their system design points. He was one of the originators of the Tandem Non-Stop transaction system and a life-long transaction processing bigot. Now he's talking openly about his ACID apostasy. If Pat is ready to cast that aside, I think everyone else ought to at least take it seriously. At present the big 3 online companies are big enough and cash rich enough that they can afford a lot of awfully smart people developing these things for their own internal use in their online stores and search engines. I am wondering what will happen if/when they decide to commoditize and sell their technology on the open market. Although I know Pat pretty well, I have zero inside knowledge on whether such a thing is even being contemplated. It is just my own idle speculation based on observation of the potential market upside. CC ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
