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Oracle's GPL Linux Firewire Clustering
Smoking writes "It seems that Oracle just released libraries to allow low cost Linux clustering solutions using firewire...
Aside from the coolness factor (imagine a beowulf cluster of DV cameras...) it's quite new for Oracle to release GPL software. They also seem to include really useful tools for NIC failover, Wizard building framework and integration of the cluster into Gnome (via a gnomevfs plugin)."
This is great news for anyone that is a firewire afficionado. Because millions of people will be doing firewire clustering? No. But it does show the versatility of the standard. Its a shame that Intel has such a hard on to kill it, because firewire really is a great technology.
As firewire begins to scale to higher speeds this looks like an even better method to connect not only things like computers and their peripherals - but things like your television to your PVR to your camera to your computer.
The additional bandwidth itself brings versatility. Can you watch a movie, listen to Internet radio, or play a network game over a 9600 bps modem? Yes, technically. But you wouldn't, because it'd be painful.
Do you ohh and ahh over the fact you can hook up "almost anything" to a serial port?
No, because you can't. The classic serial port was already inappropriate for the bandwidth required of a printer, over ten years ago.
Oracle has jumped 100% on the Linux bandwagon and is pushing it as the OS of choice for RAC (real application clusters) and claimed to switch all their internal production servers to Linux in the near future.
To see them giving code and "lessons learned" information back to the open source community is awesome. This is the type of business and open source relationship that proiveds a win, win for both the commercial party and the open source parties involved. Oracle benefits from a free and stable platform while contributing back to that community code that can help make the product (Linux is this case) better for everyone else.
Thanks Oracle, nice to see you doing a good thing for open source.
On a serious note, it is great to see that large corporations pay more attention to OSS. They starting to understand, that by giving GPLed code to people, in return they will get great ideas, patches, and positive publicity in tech masses. Let's hope more corps will adopt this policy.
WRONG! your north to southbridge connections is 266MB/s (notice the big B) which is 2,128Mb/s which is roughly the speed of a fibrechannel connection (of course most fibrechannel adapters are installed on systems with much greater internal bandwidth). BTW, AGP is great for pushing data in one direction, but it sucks at bringing information to the system. For similar bandwidth to AGP get a server chipset based motherboard with PCI-X or infiband connections.
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Um, OODBMS is not really
that innovative, although I will agree that it is cool. I prefer PostgreSQL myself, but that's because I don't have tens of thousands of dollars to spend on all the commercial databases. *shrugs*
I apologise in advance if Oracle has redefined OODBMS to mean something different than I'm used to it meaning, but at least as much as I know what it is, it's hardly innovative. It's been around a very long time.
Random and weird software I've written.
Firewire is hot-swappable. Try that with a external SCSI Drive. (not a hot swappable disk, the entire drive)
Well, technically an external SCSI drive can be hot swapped (I've done it), but having the bus idle while swapping is important. It's just not a good idea to yank out a drive when the bus is active. I haven't worked with true hot-swap drives; my hope is that they leave behind an intact bus when they are removed (otherwise, I guess hot-swap would be pretty moot).
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
> Kinda intrusive for a GPL thing, no?
Then why don't you mirror it so the rest of us can download (and subsequently mirror) it without having to register ? The GPL guarantees you that right. =)
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
Ah, but bandwidth is highly relevant! That's why the computer you're using now doesn't have 8-bit ISA slots anymore. The huge increases in speed since 1980 have allowed computers and their peripherals to do things that simply wouldn't be feasible if we were still running at 0.89 MHz like my 1983 TRS-80 Color Computer II.
:-)
Take your car analogy, for example. Say you have a rusty Ford Pinto. You might be able to hit 60 MPH if you're lucky and have a tailwind, but it will get you from Point A to Point B (eventually). Later, you upgrade to a Dodge Viper. It's still a car, and will still get you from Point A to Point B, but the huge increase in speed (bandwidth) will most certainly change your driving habits. It will probably change your dating habits, too, if you're single. Not that a Firewire port will appeal to the ladies, of course, unless you use it creatively. With the ladies, it's not the size of the port, it's how you use it that matters.
With a Pinto, you have transportation, but you won't be allowed anywhere near the Autobahn. With a Viper, you can not only drive the Autobahn, you may even manage to pass a few cars. With the ability to move massive amounts of data hundreds of times more quickly than with a normal serial port, a Firewire port enables you to deal with data sets which heretofore would have been unrealistically big (such as full motion video, etc.) True, there will be (and are) technologies faster than Firewire, and when those technologies become accepted and affordable for the average user, Firewire will fall by the wayside, having served its purpose.
To say that bandwidth is irrelevant is the opposite of true. Bandwidth is speed. Everyone wants faster, bigger, better, for cheaper. Faster data links will enable portable devices to eventually hold far more information than they do now and transfer that information in less time. Being able to deal with increased information faster and more easily will enable us to use technologies in ways almost unimaginable now. What if our Palm Pilots had the same power and speed as a 1024-way SMP supercomputer? We could each do our own weather modeling, nuclear simulations, protein folding, or play a killer game of Quake 2^14 while checking our email and downloading the latest DVDs. Would you still want to hotsync over a 9600-baud serial port? I think not.
now if only some enterprising storage device manufacturer would make an actual firewire drive, instead of the typical bastardized IDE-with-a-Firewire-bridge crap they've been selling. . .
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