It's still no replacement for offsite backups but Lime Technology (http://lime-technology.com/) has a JBOD+parity solution that uses a parity drive to protect your data but even in a 2 disk failure more you only lose the data from those disks (or if the second was the parity drive you just lose the data from the one disk). And in the case of a single drive failure it'll limp along using the parity drive until you replace the bad disk and rebuild. The 3-drive version is free but if you want to go bigger they charge a nominal cost (sub $100)
It works as a great solution for a media server where you may not necessarily care about all the data but you'd prefer to not lose ALL of it at once should multiple drives fail.
As long as there are only a few different "Heterogeneous" configurations then it shouldn't be that bad. We essentially already have that with GPU's and to a lesser extent Physics Accelerators. What will really be a nightmare is if they start making the cores modular and we start getting hundreds of different configurations. I can just see the game requirements on the side of a box now - must have a CPU with 2 general purpose cores, 4 vector cores, 2 VC1 cores and 3 vertex units.
Oh, and anyone who thinks software development cycles are long and expensive now, just wait until the code needs to be written for and tested against every possible combination:-)
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It's still no replacement for offsite backups but Lime Technology (http://lime-technology.com/) has a JBOD+parity solution that uses a parity drive to protect your data but even in a 2 disk failure more you only lose the data from those disks (or if the second was the parity drive you just lose the data from the one disk). And in the case of a single drive failure it'll limp along using the parity drive until you replace the bad disk and rebuild. The 3-drive version is free but if you want to go bigger they charge a nominal cost (sub $100)
It works as a great solution for a media server where you may not necessarily care about all the data but you'd prefer to not lose ALL of it at once should multiple drives fail.
Yes, but it is a LOT cheaper for an ISP to increase their capacity on the back-end than it is to push it all the way out to the last mile.
As long as there are only a few different "Heterogeneous" configurations then it shouldn't be that bad. We essentially already have that with GPU's and to a lesser extent Physics Accelerators. What will really be a nightmare is if they start making the cores modular and we start getting hundreds of different configurations. I can just see the game requirements on the side of a box now - must have a CPU with 2 general purpose cores, 4 vector cores, 2 VC1 cores and 3 vertex units.
Oh, and anyone who thinks software development cycles are long and expensive now, just wait until the code needs to be written for and tested against every possible combination :-)