Clustering with Consolidated Physical Storage?

Davathar asks: "My friend and I have been toying with the idea of building a cluster server. And in my research I've come up with a few questions I haven't found answers to yet. Right now this is just an idea we haven't put any money into. But if it seems feasible and fun, we may organize a LUG and build it. With dozens of individual machines standing alone and drawing power, the bill can add up quickly. So I've been trying to find ways to reduce power consumption and parts cost."

"It's always seemed to be stupid to convert AC to DC for the UPS, then convert back to AC for the built in power supply and then back to DC for the hardware. Does anyone know of single conversion solutions in the UPS market? Something that goes from AC to DC and then straight to the hardware with protection and backup?

And the next and probably bigger question is about hard drive storage. With the low cost of RAM these days it's very reasonable to put a GB or more RAM in a single unit. And with that much space in RAM, who needs a swap file? So my idea is to design the workhorse units with a heap of RAM and no local storage. This should in theory save power draw, equipment costs and increase reliability. But is it workable?

Linux should be able to boot from network, and I know there are Motherboards out there that support it as well. But I've never tried this. Do they still require a local disk for some other purpose after the initial boot? Would it be possible to run everything from RAM? Would the network traffic become a big problem when the units needed to read or write to the disk array?

What resources are out there that I may have missed?"

Comments

Edison electrocuting an elephant

[bleeeeck]

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