Re: Plans for 1.8+ (2.0?)

["Justin C. Sherrill" <justin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, February 18, 2007 10:20 am, Steve O'Hara-Smith wrote:

> 	Spreading one big environment over a huge number of machines is
> indeed something that those with money to burn can do, spreading several
> small environments over a few machines is something that would be nice to
> be able to do.

I've run into a number of situations like this, where a given task was
spread over several servers.  Tasks such as database storage, a web
interface for people to use, and devices for communication with other
hardware usually get split among at least one machine per purpose.

Think of a webmail installation, or any web commerce site.  These
situations often end up with one machine reaching its CPU or network
bandwidth limit, while others reach a disk limit.  Because you have to
divide tasks on a per-machine basis, you always end up wasting disk or CPU
somewhere.  There is specialized software to handle some parts of this,
like load balancers for http, but that's not going to help disk issues.

Expanding disk (and CPU power) is going to make things like DragonFly more
useful, not less, because there's more to contribute to the network.  I
can think of several scaling and resource issues I've seen in my workplace
that would have almost no impact in a single-system-image environment.