There are a number of products/projects offering SSI functionality, which is essentially the opposite of multiple virtual machines on a single real machine, and more like the RAID mentioned earlier: Multiple real machines are ganged together in a way which appears to the applications to be a single system running a single OS. Each node contributes all its resources to the community. Any node can fail, and the other nodes pick up the slack.
I'm pretty sure Google uses something like this, and that's why their custom-built blades even include hard-drives and battery backup; because they're more than mere blades: They're complete PCs (sans screen and keyboard), meant to be a fully operational node, contributing not just CPU and RAM, but HD and power to the whole.
I think it's brilliant. And it's about time, too. Can you just picture home or small business servers made of a small, user-expandable stack of interconnecting modules accessed via thin-clients or phone apps?
Discussion on:
Message 2 of 1
The best of ZDNet, delivered
ZDNet Newsletters
Get the best of ZDNet delivered straight to your inbox
