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)."

Comments

I had hoped the firewire was for net

[tolldog]

I hoped that they were making strong firewire net connections and ways of channeling the systems together into some sort of hypercube formation.
That would make it appear as a true parallel processing system and giving some API to take advantage of it. I guess something like that is still possible and with firewire being fast and cheap, it is something that may be worth looking in to.

-Tim

Re:Cheap!

[DuBois]

Not to mention the fact that FireWire is mostly self-configuring. I've not seen a self-configuring Fibre Channel anything.

My office-mate just spent a week attempting to configure a Brocade-switched Fibre Channel setup for HACMP. In his defense, it was his first attempt at such.

Everything I've ever heard about Fibre Channel reminds me of something Rube Goldberg threw together.

Firewire isn't just for DV!

[coene]

I dont know why every time Firewire is brought up, someone mentions it in relation to DV.. DV is one of the simpler uses for Firewire, the real treasure is in its ability to link ALMOST ANYTHING!

This really is very cool stuff, and although I'm as suprised as everyone else about Oracle releasing open-source software (GPL nonetheless), it's another huge step forward.

Things like this piss off Microsoft to the Nth degree. That rocks!

Red Hat to use Oracle's cluster software

[bstadil]

There is more Oracle news announced. This was just posted over at InfoWorld. Me thinks its as much a blocking move towards .NET, see below.

From article.

: Linux backers are working to strengthen the OS and bring it closer to competing with the proprietary versions of Unix that currently dominate the data center. Adding a clustered file system into Red Hat Linux is another step toward this larger goal.

hmm, not much there

[jpc]

After going through the crappy registration process, what do I find: not much at all.

The (code not available) firewire stuff is a fix to allow sharing of firewrire disks. Which has been in the kernel for quite some time (perhaps they submitted it), but it is hardly radical (couple of lines of code, if your hardware happens to support it).

Seems more like a PR announcement to me.

Re:Cheap!

[JabberWokky]

Yes, but for some applications dropping $12k into the budget is not possible, and yet something similar at a lower cost would be ideal. Heck, this is cheaper than shared SCSI using brand name equipment. Not a bad compromise between speed and cost.

--
Evan

Shared Disk

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone know how firewire makes it any easier to share a hard disk between systems, for clustering support? According to the Oracle description of the patch "Firewire allows developers to easily and cheaply build a clustered system on a shared disk, which is useful for testing clustered applications...".

In a normal cluster configuration, SCSI provides an interface for allowing a hard disk to be shared between actual servers, so that if one goes down another can take ownership of the SCSI disk. Fibre is a common carrier, linking the computer systems to a disk array system (SCSI over Fiber), and Firewire could be used to replace it, but is the only benefit its expense?

Firewire is not an alien technology

[kenp2002]

Really people it's just a high speed interface. Not really that much different that an old serial port, just faster. Do you ohh and ahh over the fact you can hook up "almost anything" to a serial port? Of course not. Firewire is no more, or less, versitle than USB, older serial, or even parallel ports.

Now is firewire had a liquid metal port that accepted any type of interface by morphing the connection, then firewire would be fucktacular! (Copyright 2003).

P.S. Starting throwing Copyright notifications on your posts, the "media" is starting to post OUR comments in their papers without our consent!

BUS Limitations

[ehiris]

I have a limitation on my Motherboard of 266 MBps due to the link from the north to south bridge.

Could you connect a firewire card on AGP so that you can make use of the full 400 MBps that Firewire provides?

LINUX BOX as Firewire HD

[Anonymous Coward]

How about some code that lets linux act as a firewire Harddisk for other systems. I think they use the SBP-Protokoll. That would make SAN affordable.
Have an old PII and a couple of IDE-RAID-Cards to build a TB Firewire HD.

Re:Cheap!

[JabberWokky]

I'm not talking about running Oracle on top of it... if you have a project budget for Oracle, you can afford something better. Nor would I like to be the first to implement this in a production environment. :) That said, it's likely very stable, since it's on tested hardware and firewire drivers in general have been well tested. I'm thinking about situations where you'd normally have a couple servers sharing a big RAID via NFS over a small shared switch. This would fit into that level of sharing (and a few others as well), just better performance.

What's going on with firewire anyway - is there a bandwidth increase on the horizon? I tend to follow server hardware, and I know squat about firewire other than the three names and it supports 128 devices without having to have a central server a la USB. Is this is a solution that would be even more attractive when a higher capacity firewire rolls out in six months?

--
Evan

Re:Firewire's future

[Mattsson]

Mmm... This is probably a bit off topic, but I've always wondered *why* there isn't a midi over ethernet standard.
It would be great if I could just simply plug my synth's into my network and assign ip's to them.
That way I wouldn't have to have a *separate* midi "network" and I would be able to use both my mac and my pc to make music without having to move my midi interfaces between the two. :-/

And with gigabit ethernet availible, there's no problem with the bandwith being to small...

Also, you wouldn't have to connect everything *exactly* like before when moving them.
It really is hell to get everything back together in a working fashion when you've been out and about with your synth's... :-(