640 GB of Memory in a Cluster Installation

We are installing some really neat servers on our network right now. I could not resist taking pictures while the engineers were putting them together. We just purchased 10 servers (and one fail over server) that each take 64GB of ram. This totally takes me down memory lane (no pun intended) to when I had a summer job in High School, my first computer job was selling Memory for Seattle Memory. My job was to sell people an extra 16MB of ram to make people’s Windows 3.11 run faster!
Fast-forward to 2008 and I think these new servers have more memory then the entire Seattle Memory company sold in the 90’s. I can imagine that in another 10 years someone will find this blog article and think I am crazy for being so happy with 64GB in a one box. In the future I can imagine my car’s dashboard will have more random access memory then this.
These 10 servers will allow us to store all of our most valuable information in random access memory, each server will have 10% of the data stripped across them. We are going to be able to cross reference and use information in brand new ways with this cluster. We have the ability to do it right now, but we find that it takes 30 seconds to complete each operation and we have far too many operations to complete right now. This will allow us to complete the same 30 second operation in a few milliseconds. The number of operations we can complete in a day will be jumping 1500X.
Each new server was only about $6,000 per server which is super cheap compared to how much computer we got for our money a few years ago. Our top of the line computer in our arsenal back in 2001 held 4GB of ram. When Domain Tasting started we moved to 16GB of ram for our one top end processing boxes. These new servers will be configured and process information before the end of May.
This is what will process the information behind DomainTools for the next 3 years.