--- begin forwarded text Date: Tue, 13 Jan 1998 08:52:16 -0500 From: rah-web <rah@shipwright.com> Reply-To: rah@shipwright.com MIME-Version: 1.0 To: rah-web <rah@shipwright.com> Subject: Micromoney CryptoMango? http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayNew.pl?/metcalfe/metcalfe.htm [Image] [StorageTek Click Here.] [| Navigational map -- for text only please go to the bottom of the page |] [|Opinions|] [From the Ether] January 12, 1998 Mango `pooling' is the biggest idea we've seen since network computers Mango, in Westborough, Mass., is not your average software start-up. In 30 months the company has raised $30 million. Its first product, Medley97, has shipped, transparently "pooling" workgroup storage. And someone at http://www.mango.com really knows the difference between features and benefits. But it's not the benefits of Medley97 pooling that interest me. What's interesting are the features and long-term potential of Mango's underlying distributed virtual memory (DVM). Mango's pooling DVM is the biggest software idea since network computers -- perhaps since client/server -- and Microsoft had better watch out. According to Mango, Medley97 offers transparent networking that's easy to use, fast, and reliable (not to mention secure and high fiber). Windows users working together on a LAN can share files in a pool of their combined disk storage. Every pooled PC is both a client and server. Go ahead and drop Medley97 into any PC you want to pool. Medley97 installs, checks configuration, and updates required Windows networking software. The product adds the PC's storage to the pool, giving you a shared, fast, and reliable network drive, M:/, which is available on all pooled PCs. For this you pay Mango less than $125 each for up to 25 PCs. Mango CEO Steve Frank was technology chief at Kendall Square Research (KSR), the ill-fated parallel processing company near MIT that was not Thinking Machines. Frank says KSR taught him how dishonesty doesn't work but parallelism does. Unlike KSR's, Mango's parallelism just has to be on volume platforms, such as Ethernet, TCP/IP, and Windows. Hence Mango. Underlying Medley97 are DVM processes cooperating through a TCP/IP Ethernet on pooled Windows PCs. The processes manage a 128-bit object space that copies virtual 4KB pages up, down, and around a distributed memory hierarchy. Medley97 offers ease of use by hiding continuously, automatically, and adaptively behind your familiar Windows user interface -- just below the file system APIs and above physical disk pages. Medley97 offers performance by moving files through the Ethernet from disk to disk and from disk to memory, closer to where the pages are used most. And Medley97 offers reliability by keeping synchronized backup copies of file pages on different pooled PCs. Mango's DVM generalizes backup and caching. Pages are copied for nonstop operation. Copies are moved closer to where they are used. Frank says it is often faster to access a page through Ethernet from a pooled PC's semiconductor memory than to access it from a local disk. Transaction logs are kept on all pooled PCs. The DVM detects when a PC drops out of a pool and copies any page that thereby lacks sufficient backups. When a PC rejoins a pool, transaction logs ensure it accesses updated pages. The garbage collection of deleted pages runs in the background. Noticing that Medley97 is available for up to 25 PCs, I asked the perennial parallelism question, "Does it scale?" Frank's answer: Yes. Medley97 is limited to 25 PCs only because that's all Mango has so far found time to test. With each PC adding resources, pool performance is "superlinear" as far as the eye can see. Well, this makes pooling the next in a long list of major computing paradigms: batch mainframes, interactive minicomputers, stand-alone PCs, PC LANs, client/server, peer-to-peer, thin-client, server clustering, and now peer clustering or pooling. According to Frank, Medley next needs to go from Ethernet to Internet. To support many pools. To add change control and archiving. Medley also needs to go beyond Windows. To pool processing as well as storage. So Medley, now written in C++, needs what else? Java. You can log into a Medley pool from anywhere and have your workgroup files available on the M:/ drive. With Java you could pool non-Wintel network computers. Well, if pooling scales, the whole World Wide Web should be one big pool. Mango's DVM generalizes the caching now done ad hoc all over the Web -- on server disks, in clusters, in caching farms, in proxy servers, in browsers, and in the file systems of PCs. Add Java network computers and before Frank knows it, Mango will be ripe for purchase if not integration by Microsoft. ------------------------------ [Image] Technology pundit Bob Metcalfe invented Ethernet in 1973 and founded 3Com in 1979, and today he specializes in the Internet. Send e-mail to Metcalfe@infoworld.com. Missed a column? Go back for more. [Image] ------------------------------ Copyright © 1998 InfoWorld Media Group Inc. | SiteMap |Search | PageOne | Conferences | Reader/Ad Services | | Enterprise Careers | Opinions | Test Center | Features | | Forums | Interviews | InfoWorld Print | InfoQuote | [Lion's Den] [InfoWorld Electric Features] [Intel Manageability] --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com), Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/ Ask me about FC98 in Anguilla!: <http://www.fc98.ai/>