

Schooner announces $45K optimized memcached and MySQL appliances - wmf
http://www1.schoonerinfotech.com/x13.xml

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wmf
A few more details:
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/13/schooner_memcached_m...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/13/schooner_memcached_mysql/)

"There's nothing too special about this hardware or using Linux ... Where
Schooner has done its R&D is in creating a clone of Memcached that has been
reworked to take advantage of the multiple cores and instruction threads in
modern processors like the Xeon 5500s and it is also keenly away of memory,
both flash and main, inside the box."

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russss
That's quite interesting - tiered storage for Memcache - but I already hate
them for not open-sourcing it. Facebook made some _amazing_ performance
changes to Memcache and had no qualms about open-sourcing it.

I'm not that convinced about the whole tiered-storage thing. Memcache is a
simple LRU cache. The moment it stops being a simple cache is the moment
you've started doing it wrong. This is the golden rule which has been worked
out over several years of Memcache development.

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DarkShikari
A few years ago I saw a company selling rather servers that, instead of using
hard disks or SSDs, used massive striped arrays of RAM (~128GB per server) to
provide absurd throughput and latency for database operations. It had an
automated system that backed up the data to hard disks in real-time, so if the
system lost power, it would be able to fully back up before the UPS ran out.

You can imagine the ungodly throughput and latency of such a system.

~~~
russss
RamSan: <http://www.superssd.com/>

Nice machines if you need absolutely the best (persistent) IO performance. I
believe EVE Online uses a ton of them to store their game state on.

~~~
DarkShikari
Yup, that's the one I was thinking of--knew about it from CCP as well.

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russss
This _totally_ misses the point of Memcache. Firstly, why do you need a disk
at all, let alone 512GB of flash?

Secondly, the whole point of Memcache is that you can distribute it across
multiple boxes. Facebook, the largest Memcache user in the world, does fine
with that.

We could easily buy 640GB of memcache capacity for the price they're asking
for 64GB.

~~~
wmf
This box is $45K for 512GB, so I don't know where you're getting 64GB. It's an
appliance, so what's inside it doesn't matter; they're using flash because
it's (supposed to be) cheaper and denser than DRAM (see related discussion
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=558820> ). There is a difference between
a cluster with N boxes and a cluster with N/8 boxes; if they're similar total
cost almost everyone would choose to have fewer servers.

~~~
russss
It's $45k for 512GB of _disk_ and 64GB of RAM. And however fast flash is, it's
not as fast as RAM by a fair margin. Memcache is all about RAM.

And if I had a choice of 640GB of Memcache in one box, or in 8 boxes, I'd
chose the 8 boxes. You need redundancy, and you need parallelism.

~~~
teej
It's not for going from 8 -> 1 box. It's for going from 64 -> 8 boxes.

~~~
russss
Right, sorry. But my point still stands. SSD != RAM.

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vicaya
Makes sense. I've been telling a competing startup about value-added open
stack appliances. OTOH, the comparison numbers are completely BS. Nothing
prevent people buying a similar Dell for less than half the price (I just
configured a dual 5560, 64GB RAM, 512GB Intel SSD R710 for about $18K which is
a lot less than $45K)

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moonpolysoft
Not sold on the performance increases. Facebook was able to get 200k req/s out
memcache just by reworking the code.
<http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=39391378919>. Compared to the
claimed 300k req/s for this I don't really see a big value add.

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sho
_"512 GB Schooner-optimized Intel® X25-E enterprise-class flash memory"_

Memory? They're SSDs. Why the misleading language?

I'm sure they're great devices but SSDs are not memory and referring to them
as such just sounds sleazy.

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staunch
It _is_ flash memory. There's nothing sleazy about it. Anyone who doesn't know
the difference between DRAM and and flash memory has no business even
considering ordering one of these.

~~~
sho
Yes, the basic technology is flash memory, but it is packaged and accessed in
the form of a disk drive, and it is conventional to refer to it in that way.

Claiming "512GB flash memory" is a pretty non-standard way of saying "contains
an array of 8x64GB SSDs", or however they've organised it. Other vendors don't
do that. The implementation of the storage array is a pretty salient factor in
a device of this type, wouldn't you say? I would certainly want to know, for
example, the interface by which the array was accessed, its filesystem, its
RAID type, etc. Referring to them as "memory" implies a memory-bus-speed
interface, and the x-25 is a SATA device.

<http://www.intel.com/design/flash/nand/extreme/index.htm>

The implementation and interface is highly relevant. To take the argument to
its absurd extreme, they could bundle a couple of hundred 2GB USB sticks in
the box. Would it still be cool to say it had hundreds of gigabytes of "flash
memory"?

