I'm probably way off on left field, and thinking of old technology (well, a
couple of years) but what about using an IBM 390 mainframe running Linux, with a
VTS (virtual tape server) system connected to it?  Or have those gone by the
wayside to something else?  I forget the specs on the VTS system, but compared
to our old method of data processing it cut our total system processing time
almost in half.  I think we had two minor failures while I was at that job.
Though, we were running OS390 on it then, as I'm positive they're still running
it now.


Shawn


Liz Burke-Scovill wrote:

> On Fri, 16 Mar 2001, Andy Zbikowski wrote:
>
> > Depending on what it is you're doing, you may want to look at the Linux
> > Terminal Server Project. (www.ltsp.org, lstp.sourceforge.net) Diskless thin
> > client goodness...
> >
> > How are you thinking of using RAM disks?
>
> See my previous post on Domino and RAM disks - at least in the Windows
> platform, Domino works best if you have the OS & Domino on one spindle,
> the databases on another spindle, and transactional logging for domino on
> a third spindle...but because logging is reading and writing to a physical
> disk (which isn't as fast as RAM) it creates a bottle next - and then if
> you're in a small server environment where you have transactional logging
> and db's on the same drive, it actually decreases performance because you
> then have a double bottleneck. The theory on Windows is that if you have
> transactional logging on ramdisk, then you save a read/write to the drive
> and greatly increase performance...
>
> What I want to find out is if ramdisk is even worth pursuing in
> linux because of the way linux uses resources. We know that in general you
> have better performance for the same hardware using linux than
> windows...when I have the resources to test it (ie., a box big enough to
> handle the multiple spindles) I want to check the muliple spindle thing
> and see if it's worth pursuing that in linux as well.
>
> Liz