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640 GB of Memory in a Cluster Installation
April 25th, 2008 by 
Jay Westerdal
We are installing some really neat servers on our network right now. I could not resist taking pictures while the engineers were putting them together. We just purchased 10 servers (and one fail over server) that each take 64GB of ram. This totally takes me down memory lane (no pun intended) to when I had a summer job in High School, my first computer job was selling Memory for Seattle Memory. My job was to sell people an extra 16MB of ram to make people’s Windows 3.11 run faster!
Fast-forward to 2008 and I think these new servers have more memory then the entire Seattle Memory company sold in the 90’s. I can imagine that in another 10 years someone will find this blog article and think I am crazy for being so happy with 64GB in a one box. In the future I can imagine my car’s dashboard will have more random access memory then this.
These 10 servers will allow us to store all of our most valuable information in random access memory, each server will have 10% of the data stripped across them. We are going to be able to cross reference and use information in brand new ways with this cluster. We have the 
ability to do it right now, but we find that it takes 30 seconds to complete each operation and we have far too many operations to complete right now. This will allow us to complete the same 30 second operation in a few milliseconds. The number of operations we can complete in a day will be jumping 1500X.
Each new server was only about $6,000 per server which is super cheap compared to how much computer we got for our money a few years ago. Our top of the line computer in our arsenal back in 2001 held 4GB of ram. When Domain Tasting started we moved to 16GB of ram for our one top end processing boxes. These new servers will be configured and process information before the end of May.
This is what will process the information behind DomainTools for the next 3 years.
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14 Comments »
April 25th, 2008 at 5:29 pm
Thats a lot of processing power! I wonder how large are your Data Disks . . .
April 25th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
That is awesome! Very nice.
“I can imagine that in another 10 years someone will find this blog article and think I am crazy for being so happy with 64GB in a one box.”
….not trying to date myself, but, I shudder to think about the days when 4K (yes, K) was a LOT of RAM!
Here’s an article that warms my heart. Brings me back to my boyhood days.
Enjoy: http://www.hofstra.edu/pdf/CompHist_9812tla6.PDF
Good luck with the new config.
April 25th, 2008 at 5:54 pm
‘640K of memory should be enough for anybody’ – Bill Gates 1981
things have changed alot since the early days. good luck with your new toys Jay
April 25th, 2008 at 6:27 pm
“That’s hot” -Paris Hilton
April 25th, 2008 at 9:55 pm
That’s real neat. I doubt my faithful Win98 SE could use that much memory but I’d love to try it.
At Christmas the family wanted me to find a new computer. I went to Vision Computers site and found a machine there. A tower case, a bunch of memory and a fast processor. They nixed the idea when they figured out I planned on stuffing all the junk in this machine in that box. With Win 98 of course. I figured it would reboot faster.
Oh well, maybe next year.
April 26th, 2008 at 8:54 am
My first laptop, a Toshiba, has a 20 MG hard drive (Packrat that I am, I still have it), a rectangular blue screen with white lettering, and a big clunky housing (”laptop” was a slight exaggeration). It has a port so that you can link it to a desktop (which was also 20 MG).
For DOS “word processing,” it was more than enough.
We paid $2,000 (a HUGE investment for us at that time) for it in 1990 or 1991, and we used it for three or four years. On various trips, I dragged it around (and no one at airports bothered to check it).
I created my first magazine on it, and I had all the Word Perfect codes memorized, so when Windows arrived, I dug in and said, “Who needs that?”
Until 1998, I used the DOS emulation feature on various computers, and then I got a clue.
As a teacher, I was horrified at the internet because I could see what would happen when my students wrote papers (and I was right).
I just had to learn another set of skills (which I did).
Ha!
I head off a lot of problems by my first-day talk; they know from the start that I know my way around the internet. I also maintain a blog where I publish some of my students’ writing (Publishes.us
), and I let them know about it. Some of them get a kick out of seeing their work acknowledged and published.
Those servers you have, Jay, are out of my league, but I’ll bet within five years or so, I’ll know my way around those too.
This tech revolution has required an entire new way of thinking and doing; for those of you who grew up with this technology, you have no idea how many of your parents and grandparents have struggled to adapt.
Best,
Ms Domainer
April 27th, 2008 at 6:10 pm
Yeah. I remember a friend asking if I wanted to go halvsies on a box of floppies. “I’ll never use all 10 of ‘em.” he said.
April 28th, 2008 at 6:30 am
Bringing back alot of memories, I used to sell those also, back in the 80’s…
Thanks for the memories…
April 28th, 2008 at 11:00 pm
Can you get the title of this blog post right? It’s “Installation” not “Installion”. Thanks, P
May 3rd, 2008 at 7:09 pm
You said “Each new server was only about $6,000 per server which is super cheap compared to how much computer we got for our money a few years ago.”
Was that just for the RAM? Or the server with memory?
November 28th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
A certain Mr.Gates
once said that 640K of memory will be sufficient for anybody and today his company’s latest OS requires a minimum of 2 GB of memory … 
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