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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.
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
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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