Plans for 1.8+ (2.0?)

[Steve O'Hara-Smith]

On Sun, 18 Feb 2007 14:25:57 +0100
Michel Talon <talon at lpthe.jussieu.fr> wrote:

> Of course it is none of my business, but i have always wandered about the
> real usefulness of a clustering OS in the context of free systems,

<snip>

> Small installations are the natural target of free
> systems, and in this context i remain convinced that the clustering ideas
> have an utility next to null.

	Well personally I can see uses for a clustering OS mostly for the
purpose of minimising the impact of hardware failures so that instead of
running each service and environment I need on a different machine I can
run them on different clusters supported by redundant resources on several
machines. Right now I mirror data among machines to prevent loss but if one
machine is down then everything I do on that machine is unavailable until
I either replace that machine or bring it's services and so forth up on
another machine. With clusters providing an abstraction between machines
and computing environments and bringing some degree of redundancy I hope to
be able to do better.

	Spreading one big environment over a huge number of machines is
indeed something that those with money to burn can do, spreading several
small environments over a few machines is something that would be nice to
be able to do.

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