Idea:Relatively Reliable Ram Disk Server (specs updated 2012-Q2) Two commodity servers Parts (for each) MB with 8 or 16 DIMM slots Two 10G ethernet cards for storage SATA RAID Four smallish enterprise drives: Two drives in a mirrored pair for OS Two drives for backing store 32GB DIMMs of ECC Registered RAM Parts for file server node Bonded pair of 1G or 10G cards Building Make a large RAM disk on each (leave 2GB for OS) On one machine: Share the RAM disk with the other machine via one crossover network (one of the 10G cards on each machine) via iSCSI Share pair of backing drives via iSCSI On other machine (file server) Using md, on each, mirror the iSCSI RAM disk to the local RAM disk. Make a filesystem on mirrored RAM disk Share RAM filesystem via NFS and SAMBA. Combine iSCSI drives and local drives into RAID 0+1 backing store. Make journaled filesytem on backing store disk. Mount backing store Put each server on a sizable independent UPS wit
Systems, tools, and observations.