[Discuss] Dev Ops - architecture (local not cloud)

[kentborg at borg.org (Kent Borg)]

On 12/13/2013 12:07 PM, Derek Martin wrote:
> if your NFS server is built for it (i.e. it isn't just yet another 
> desktop with a single local disk) you should easily be able to far 
> exceed the performance of a workstation's cheap local disk.

Maybe because I was young and impressionable during the early personal 
computer era, it seems better to me to give users their own hardware 
rather than servers...unless there is a real economy of scale that kicks 
in for the server.  Now that the PC era is coming to a close, this might 
change, but at the moment isn't the sweet spot for disk performance per 
dollar drawing on the same technology for servers as for individual 
computers?  Sure, the server will have somewhat faster parts, but it 
might also have more than one user. And the network might have some 
congestion.

Whenever the power blinks at my job my computer stays happy, because I 
have a tiny UPS that can ride out short outages.  But the rest of the 
services on our network seem to take the better part of an hour to all 
come back.  Because my local computer is local it can be simpler and 
more reliable.

Something else I long ago observed: Because ethernet degrades gracefully 
it always operates degraded.

-kb, the Kent who is skeptical that NFS is really the better way.