On Wed, Jan 24, 2007 at 12:15:21AM -0700, Jason J. W. Williams wrote:
> Wow. That's an incredibly cool story. Thank you for sharing it! Does
> the Thumper today pretty much resemble what you saw then?
Yes, amazingly so: 4-way, 48 spindles, 4u. The real beauty of the
match between ZFS and Thumper was (and is) that ZFS unlocks new economics
in storage -- smart software achieving high performance and ultra-high
reliability with dense, cheap hardware -- and that Thumper was (and is)
the physical embodiment of those economics. And without giving away
too much of our future roadmap, suffice it to say that one should expect
much, much more from Sun in this vein: innovative software and innovative
hardware working together to deliver world-beating systems with undeniable
economics.
And actually, as long as we're talking history, you might be interested to
know the story behind the name "Thumper": Fowler initially suggested the
name as something of a joke, but, as often happens with Fowler, he tells a
joke with a straight face once too many to one person too many, and next
thing you know it's the plan of record. I had suggested the name "Humper"
for the server that became Andromeda (the x8000 series) -- so you could
order a datacenter by asking for (say) "two Humpers and five Thumpers."
(And I loved the idea of asking "would you like a Humper for your Thumper?")
But Fowler said the name was too risque (!). Fortunately the name
"Thumper" stuck...
- Bryan
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Bryan Cantrill, Solaris Kernel Development. http://blogs.sun.com/bmc
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