John Furrier32
Q5: What's your litmus test for whether a product is actually "scale out"?
John Furrier
customer want to know
jeff dinisco
node fails, service still online
Patrick Rogers
Are there any software limits to the architecture.
Chris Dwan
I don't think it's a useful question. I would rather deal with technical features than buzzword compliance.
Andrew Miller
are there hard maximums which require major equipment upgrades? In simpler terms, no forklift upgrades.
I am John White
When I can power on a new node and it auto joins a cluster
Jeff Hughes
How they answer what the limit is
John Furrier
Ok Chris: @fdmts What technologies are driving the change to scale out
Patrick Rogers
Is it a consistent namespace across all nodes or components in the architecture.
Chris Dwan
@andriven All systems have limits. When a vendor says "no limits" I hear "we didn't scale test it hard enough."
jeff dinisco
a 4 node cluster provides exactly 4X the performance of a single node
Andrew Miller
in defense of non-scaleout, if you can predict your growth and environment, a non-scaleout architecture might make the most sense financially. I'd argue that almost no companies can accurately predict that in a 3 year window though.
Chris Dwan
I think we handled the drivers to scale out in an earlier question. I mean ... containerization seems like a biggie.
Stuart Miniman
we argued about this for years - just because something can scale, doesn't mean that it really is scale-out. Need to understand the limitations. Of course, not everything must be infinitely scalable to be useful.
Andrew Miller
@fdmts partly agree - sometimes I'll distinguish between theoretical limits (i.e. our filesystem can grow to 32 exabytes) and what they've tested/QA-ed especially.
John Furrier
I like where Chris @fdmts is going with this..what triggers the BS detector when vendors talk "scale out"
jeff dinisco
@fdmts agree about limits, but solid tech and qa rigor should lead to limits that 99% of customers can't reach
Stephen Pao
It's also about minimum size and the linearity from there. I think if you have lots of upfront requirements to achieve scale, you are simply planning for capacity growth, not scaling out.
Patrick Rogers
Non-scale out typically requires you to provision capacity ahead of when you actually need it which becomes very expensive.
jeff dinisco
good question, plenty of BS, anytime there's talk of a masters or slaves, any node more important than another means not true scale out
Chris Dwan
@dinisco More seriously, you never remove a bottleneck, you just move it around. Recall the happy days when the whole industry freaked out about how RAID rebuilds on 1TB disks would take longer than MTBF on another disk in the set.