"The future of NetBSD" by Charles M. Hannum

[Matt Emmerton]

> On Thu, Aug 31, 2006 at 09:58:59AM -0700, Matthew Dillon wrote:
> :     that 75% of the interest in our project has nothing to do with my
> :     project goals but instead are directly associated with work being
done
> :     by our relatively small community.  I truely appreciate that effort
> :     because it allows me to focus on the part that is most near and dear
> :     to my own heart.
>
> Big question: after all the work that will go into the clustering, other
than
> scientific research, what will the average user be able to use such
advanced
> capability for?

Average user?  Not much.  But for anyone who administers server farms, the
single-system-image style of clustering is a promise that multiple vendors
have tried to deliver, but all have failed (in my memory).   Putting on my
flame-suit, SCO's Non-Stop Clusters with UnixWare was the best
implementation I've seen, but that failed to mature and was axed after the
Caldera takeover.  (Bill Hacker will likely disagree, but I will point out
that I've only been active in the U*ix space for ~10 years at most.)

This is where DFly can really steal FreeBSD's thunder.  Many of those who
use FreeBSD do so in an ISP context.  Many of those installations have
multiple servers either for load-balancing or redundancy issues.  But
maintaining many separate servers is a pain.  Being able to have multiple
DFly boxes that are clustered together and can be administered (at least
from the application space) as a single-system-image environment will
provide a great boost to productivity.

Sure, Xen and virtualization have their place, but there still is a place
for huge systems -- whether it's a multi-million dollar 64-way machine (like
I use at my "day job"), or a cluster of 32 quad-core Opterons.

Regards,
--
Matt Emmerton