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To: Paul Engel who wrote (105092)	6/29/2000 11:45:00 AM
From: Rob Young	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Paul, But all the AlphaServers support PCI and will surely support Infiniband. Got to stay current with industry standard components. That's why IBM lost out with SNA and MCA. But this goes beyond getting to I/O out on a disk. With the RamDisk I mentioned, it is based on RAM, i.e. memory. Much much faster and the bandwidth has no comparison. What about writes? Non-volatile? Absolutely. Solution is RamDisk as a shadowset member. Next tweek of shadowset software (i.e. software based RAID1) will ensure all the reads hit the RamDisk and writes of course hit both.. so your write bottleneck is the hard disks that make up the other shadowset members. You can spread them across many controllers and get great bandwidth AND the other great aspect of this .. since the hard disks making up the shadowset are "write-only" members , they are not impacted by reads interspersed AND write-back cache at the controller level ensures low latency ... Bottom Line? Will always depend on how much you spend or what your problem is to solve... So maybe you live with volatility and get great read and write bandwidth or use a shadowset and get 20 Gig/sec on reads and 3 or 4 Gig on writes (disks spread across 10 next generation controllers, not cheap but I am after performance for this example). Rob