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US Government Upgrades RAM
Deep Throat writes "Techworld has the scoop on a new super-sized RAM disk that the US government has just bought for a few million dollars in order to speed up searching through huge databases. It's 2.5TB! The VP of the company that made it says it is for Washington DC and searching databases but won't say who. Techworld explains why it reckons it's the Department of Homeland Security searching in the NSA and Pentagon databases for terrorists. And apparently the government is 'very happy' with the purchase and thinking about getting more."
Sounds like they're taking heed of Google's success in attaining blazing search speeds by holding all the data in RAM.
See here.
Solid State Storage, .... the data is already saved.
http://www.freebsd.org
No comment needed.
RTFA dude. "It also includes three independent internal UPS systems to ensure that no power loss or power supply failure will stop the RamSan from performing its internal backup procedures."
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
This is supposed to be a caching system, not a long term archive. They also undoubtedly have both Uninteruptable Power Supplies (think racks full of car batteries) and generators to protect from power failure. The databases that it caches are more than likely mirrored at multiple locations, and backed up daily, if not in realtime to an autmated tape library system.
If you go to disk, just once, you need about 9ms just to get the disk heads in position. If you're reading a file system of complex database, you now have multiple disk seeks and reads. That adds up. Seeking in RAM is orders of magnitude faster. That's why all the good search engines keep *everything* in RAM all the time.
That is why Google has multiple copies of the entire web in memory.
-AS
Except that magnets can't disrupt capacitor-based storage devices such as SRAM or DRAM. Magnetic-based core memory technology came and went decades ago...
errr... "dude", look up what non-volitile means. Volatile memory generally is implemented as a series of capacitors which can be queried if they have a charge or not (1 or 0). The capacitors in the RAM in your computer, however, lose their charge very quickly, and need to be "refreshed" every couple milliseconds or so.
Non-volatile needs little or no refreshing. It's usually implemented by component that do something else than hold a charge. And thus, since it doesn't need freshing it keeps information when the power goes out. The reason all memory isn't like Non-volatile is that it is either much slower (magnetic storage) or much more expensive (ie flash and this RAM disk).
Why, o why must the sky fall when I've learned to fly?
Google sells a search appliance which also includes a (presumably) customized implementation of their searching algorithms. Basically any geeks dream - their own little Google. I read that base price is $28,000 (seems to be a hardware/software bundle).
You can keep the tin foil hat on, because this has been sold to government intelligence services.
I believe you're looking for a RocketDrive.
I believe it's a 33 MHz PCI beastie.
Read the article- it refers to the 2.5 TB space being used as temporary query data storage for a 100TB+ databank.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
RocketDrive retails for $1000 with 1GB to $3000 with 4GB. Not exactly "on the cheap" though. They used to sell it without memory, but apparently they don't anymore. Here's a review.
Even 15 years later it's still damn funny.
Just to set the record straight, the original author of this post is Jack Harvey, and it was originally published under the title "The Immortal Murderer" on January 18th, 1989 on DECUServe, the DECUS member bulletin board.
This bulletin board is still active under the name Encompasserve.org after mergers of Digital Equipment Corporation and Compaq with Hewlett Packard.
The original publication can still be found on that bulletin board in the archived Soapbox conference, note number 168.
For those of you who were not born, Monday 19-Oct-1987 was the day the stock market crashed.