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RAID has been common in servers since much earlier than 2008. In the 2000 dot-com boom servers had RAID & often multiple CPUs. (for the less well f unded, Linu

• nl 10y ago
  Sure. But RAID had its own set of problems. Because RAID relies on multiple physical disks (often SAS for performance) there were serious limits on the amount you could get in. This was prior to SSDs being widespread of course. Here's a review of a typical 1U server from 2008: The X4150 can handle up to eight 2.5-inch SAS drives (mine has four 10K drives, 72GB each), 64GB of RAM (mine has 16GB), four Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, and three PCIe slots. This puts the X4150 ahead of the mainstream server pack, as the main contenders in this space generally offer a maximum of 32GB of RAM, and between four and six local disks.[1] Assuming RAID, this had 144GB of storage, and even back then that was problematic. RAM was very small too, so keeping your DB in memory (or even a working set, or even the indexes) was difficult with a single server. And of course, yes you could go to 2U or bigger. But back then server space was expensive. Everything is a trade off of course. But my point is that in the context of 2008 hardware looking to do things differently made a lot of sense. [1] http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/review/sun_microsystems/sun_fire_x4150_server/222228/ http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/review/sun_microsystems/sun_fi...
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