I, still, hate disk drives.
After waiting for the umpteenth time for my system to finish twiddeling it’s disk drive, I had a wayback,
a flashback, Way back in the day, one of my my first jobs was managing a network of Sun diskful and diskless workstations, all connected to a Sun 4110.
diskless install and boot was easy
To install a new diskless node all I had to do was create a couple of new NFS directories, fiddle with a couple files (hostname & IP Ethernet address). Set the eeprom boot parameters on the new workstation, boot and Poof, a new node on the network was up and running.
Workstations with a new disk? Well that was another matter all together. Partitioning and Setting up and installing the local hard drive was a pain, especially back in that day. At that time you still had to do low lvl SCSI formatting before you could do a high lvl format, then you had to create the file systems, all several hours worth of work BEFORE you could start installing the OS, and apps. IF you had a master image on a spare disk drive you could DD one image to another, but that was still a pain compared to network boot setup.
A new day, a new disk
Fast forward a few years, I was working in the largest commercial UNIX production datacenter at the time (hey it was 1989 and we had well over 1000 employees trying to do their jobs on our systems, which was HUGE in the commercial world that was still dominated by mainframes and minicomputers). We where upgrading our systems to the new Swallow 4 disk drive, which had a whopping 2241 sectors in each cylinder. The down side is that a 3 U rack mounted tray could only hold 2 drives. (In comparison the same amount of space can hold over 100 drives see www.atrato.com). Those two drives, plus power supply, weighed over 50 pounds, and they where HOT, I stall have a scar on my left hand from accidentally touching one during maintenance. I wish I could find the original specifications, but those buggers consumed a lot of power.
Why are we here, again?
What do these two barely related barely relevant reminiscences of an old geek have to do with MMOs and modern systems?
Well guess what, whey you are managing an MMO, the issues I had to deal with 20 friggen years ago are still valid today. Thanks to drive density we can get a lot more storage space per rack unit, but heat and power haven’t really changed that much for storage. What has improved is performance, and not just I/O performance of the drives, but also their performance over the wire. Also with the introduction of iSCSI and the ability to boot Linux and Windows off of iSCSI volumes through software imitators, it’s even easier to do diskless booting now than it ever was.
Modern experiences
Not having disk drives in each system is a big deal for running MMOs. It means you can get your game online faster, it also means you can recover from node failures faster. It also means a lower power profile, you don’t have as many disks spinning and taking up heat. Bottom line you never have to “install” or “copy images” over the network.
