Thursday, June 23, 2005

And now, your moment of Zen Due to some additions to the household (both structural and, er, genetic?) I've moved the home office into the 18th floor of a bonafide office building for a few months. That in itself was not really blog-worthy, but as I was leaving yesterday I noticed there were a couple birds on the ledge outside my window. At first I thought they were pigeons, but realized they were a bit bigger. Much bigger. It was actually two red-tailed hawks giving me the eye from the ledge outside my window. I had just hit "Shutdown" on my pc, otherwise I would have had some amazing webcam footage. I was bummed to miss this once-in-a-blue-moon photo op, but seeing the pair base-jump off the 200ft ledge cheered me up. 7:59:05 PM      comment []  trackback []

Meiosys ... is a company just purchased by IBM. They sell a product called MetaCluster, which is a virtualization tool that limits itself to taking a snapshot of system state so that it can be restarted and/or migrated to a new system (possible with a different CPU). VMWare's ESX server can do this, as can Xen (if not now, then soon IIRC), but by focusing just on persisting the systems they save a lot on overhead: Because we provide a fine-grained virtualization at the application layer, our overhead is under 1%, compared to 15% to 40% overhead for some other technologies which enable mobility. A lot of what open source databases don't have and commercial db's do is this type of clustering/ha. It will be interesting to see if projects like Xen can close the HA feature gap orthogonally for projects like MySQL and Postgresql. 7:42:24 PM      comment []  trackback []