A short post to draw your attention to this article by Kevin Burton titled “MySQL and the Death of Raid”. Although it’s written from the MySQL point of view, he does bring up some interesting points on the advantages of what he calls a “RAISe” or Redundant Array of Independent Servers” architecture (actually I coined the RAISe acronym just now :-) ) over the traditional RAID approach of hardening the availability and performance of your disk.
Take a look and let me know what you think.
In the meantime, I’d also like to welcome Gregory Guillou to our team here in Ottawa, as he has arrived today. He’s an Oracle specialist, one of the world’s 100 or so OCMs in fact, and has particular expertise in Oracle’s clustering technology, RAC.
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RAID is one of successful transparent virtualization technologies. Oracle RAC is still far from it even though it’s on the marked for a while (taking OPS days into account) but it’s definitely the best so far. I while ago I mentioned Federated Array of Bricks which is from the same opera.
Important attribute of those technologies is transparency.
– You need to do NOTHING with your applications — just put them on RAID and it’s faster/more reliable.
– You need to do NOTHING with your database applications — move it RAC and get superb availability and scalability (well, at least according to Oracle marketing department).
– You need to do NOTHING to you databases – turn your expensive SAN into cheap FAB — keep the same or better level of availability and performance (interesting if that would ever fly).
This SENSE of transparency becomes more and more important for customers as it becomes more and more difficult to tune their more and more complex software. Dreams of a magic black-box with turbo button on — that would sale well.
What is on the market now for MySQL — components for spaghetti-like infrastructure. Unless you are a very good chef, you can’t cook it properly. Fortunately, those chefs exist outside of Google even though they are rare. ;-)
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