[nmglug] Staged cache (RFC)

[nick pitlosh]

Hey girls,

this morning i have a bit of time so i thought i would share my vision
with you all about staged cache. We all know about L1,L2,L3 and some
of us know L4. So, in todays market, we see the rapid and nearly
explosive expansion of memory sizes and parallelism in commodity
machines. We also of course see fully deprecated enterprise hardware.

My visions tell me that there is an inequality regarding the three
types of storage employed in L3 and L4, speaking of main system memory
and sata/sas, further Ethata and iscsi related tech adds another
layer. It is my proposal to build a clustered system with dedicated
caching nodes, thereby employing the best of breed solutions at level
4 storage, creating links to vast raided ramdisks in cheap machines
setup to abstract storage configuration and provide vlm based
automatic <1ms transparent storage access over esata/fc/bonded GigE.

This would effectively provide fully saturated links between ALL parts
of the filesystem. Further, the applications to VMs and multi-user
terminal servers are numerous.

in other words, its like butter.

discuss