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Concept: Virtual Ram Drive Array

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MAXIMINA

New Member
Joined
Jan 23, 2002
Location
TN
Forgive me if this concept has been brought up before, by anyone, but I've searched for some time and have never seen this idea...

The concept is simple, you have many computers, each with a maxed out amount of ram, and all over a good dual-gigabit LAN. Each PC when booted loads up a read/write hard-drive image into a virtual "ram drive". For clarification: this would be a fake hard drive, contained entirely in RAM. The ram-drive is shared over the gigabit lan. A single master computer connects to all of the virtual ram drives, and assembles them via software as a simple jbod array.

Theoretically (inside my inexperienced mind) this would create a virtual hard drive on the master computer that would have read-write access far faster than any normal array would be capable of. It would only be limited by the conventional network speeds. The master computer would become somewhat of a user-friendly supercomputer, minus distributed processing.

Pros: Unbelievable read/write speeds, the hard drive is no longer a speed bottle-neck.
Cons: Sacrifices boot time for opperation speed (Could take around an hour to get all the virtual ram-drives loaded). Possible issues with fragmentation, especially if one of the sibling machines goes down. No software currently exists to assemble a raid over a network (that I know of). Without said software it would only work for programs of a certain size (depending on the size of the ram of the sibling machines, minus room for opperating system). Storage space would be very costly to expand.

In theory the "virtual ram drive array" would be used for secondary software, programs that are run frequently, or that require a great deal of hard-drive space. i.e. Games with massive map files like BF2 may have drastically decreased load times. It also might be used for your page file for an additional speed boost when ram is limited on the master machine.

I'd love to try something like this some day... If it's actually possible.
 
Gb ethernet is not as fast as you think. It's only 125MB/S. That's pretty slow compared to the burst speeds and constant read speeds of some RAID 0 arrays which have hit like 500MB/S.

Also DDR RAM say at PC1600 (the slowest kind) is already way faster than 125MB/S.

Then we have latency people thinkg 4,4,4 speeds of DDR2 is as slow. With a LAN you're talking in average of 1ms as the fastest latency which is on the levels of hundreds of times slower.

What you have in mind minus using RAM drives on all the systems are already impliemented as SANs.
 
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