Hardware for EROS?

[Kragen Sitaker]

A couple of people asked me about this:
> The NetApp guys have a couple of megabytes of RAM --- can't remember
> what kind, but probably SRAM, so mucho dinero --- on a card with two
> batteries to sustain it through power failures.  They commit their
> "disk writes" to there.

NetApp is a company (http://www.netapp.com/) that makes
high-performance single-purpose fileservers, which they call "filers".
I am extremely impressed with their technical work; I was introduced to
it at the first Taos Technical Talk.  They are pushing the frontiers of
filesystem research, or at least, they were a couple of years ago.

Sorry to post such an off-topic thing.

On independent power grids: you can't get completely independent power
grids, but if you use New York, San Francisco, London, and Paris,
you're probably fairly close.  There is, of course, the irreducible
risk that civilization will be destroyed, causing all of these places
to lose power at once.

-- 
<kragen@pobox.com>       Kragen Sitaker     <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
The Internet stock bubble didn't burst on 1999-11-08.  Hurrah!
<URL:http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/bubble.html>
The power didn't go out on 2000-01-01 either.  :)