Hacker News Reader

Comment by Andys | Hacker News Reader

Hardware key/value store appliances is a great startup idea.

Disclaimer: I work on a key/value store, so take my opinion with a grain of salt even though I'll stay clear from self-promotion, yadda yadda.

Without distribution a key/value store is a hash table. To have any value added it's going to need to be a distributed key/value store. Distributed key/value stores, however, run just as well on commodity hardware. Problem is very few companies work at a scale at which per machine efficiency, power or other cost savings are going to matter; that's a very small market and one that's difficult to sell to.

On the other hand, a customized Linux distribution with a nice UI for deploying key/value stores would be a good idea.

My back-of-the-envelope calculations showed that a hardware-based key value store (custom chips driving DRAM plus ethernet interfaces in a 1RU chassis), would use so much less power than an average x86 server that you could charge a great price thanks to the TCO / power savings.

Can you check that you're not becoming obsolete due to Moore's law before savings recoup costs ? Also, consider the potentially reduced product flexibility of hardware vs software.

Well lets say you are operating at small scale and you can reduce your 32 servers sucking 20 kilowatts to 4 appliances sucking 5kW. Much reduced footprint, power cost, admin cost (at small scale your per server cost is going to be higher than the large scale guys). Plus someone else will have done the integration and tuning work.

I think even on a small scale, or perhaps that should be especially on a small scale, people could profitably look at the mysql/nosql/memcached (the latter optionally with persistence via flash) from some of the appliance vendors.

I have no financial interest or direct experience, but the data sheet on this:

http://www.schoonerinfotech.com/datasheets/Schooner_DS_Memca...

looks worthy of a closer read.

The thing is that there aren't very many companies running 32-server (per colo) storage clusters (unless they're using grossly underpowered machines).

Granted, but it can make sense at even smaller scale. Say 8 servers. Or, I know one group of folks that were tempted by a beefier database machine and instead happily moved to such an appliance. There's a lot of ways to spend dollars that makes sense depending on what you are trying to do. (Trading dev cycles off against hardware etc).

Personally, I don't use the appliances because for our extremely latency-sensitive apps we do it all from scratch for various reasons. For large scale storage we build off commodity machines. One of our prototypes runs very happily off machines from scalableinformatics.com - highly recommended.

Horses for courses and all that..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com