A5000: no NVRAM?

[Phil Brown]

[From Andy Wilcox]
> 
> [much snippage...]
> If you really want synchronous writes (not a bad idea for a number of
> applications, and probably Phil's main point) then the NVRAM is
> probably faster, even though it is sitting on the other end of a
> slower pipe.  But that is conjecture.  Assuming only rotational
> latency on a 10K rpm disk and 8x pipe speed, it might be close.  Even
> with fast writes enabled on volumes with small transaction loads, the
> fastest writes i've seen reported are .8 - 2 ms (order 1 millisecond),
> not order 1 microseconds.
> ...
> 
> On a related note, a colleague and friend probably on this list, Chuck
> Seeger, once remarked that he'd rather have the 1G of cache on a
> hardware Raid-5 box closer to the CPU than at the other end of a scsi
> chain.

This last pararaph is probably related to your results on the first
paragraph.
If the NVRAM in question were on an SBus card, like in the Netra NFS servers
(Why the HELL doesn't sun support that any more on non-netra servers?!!)
then the results would hopefully be better.

But even if it isn't,  I'll take 1ms vs 6 ms any day, on the things
I want to do. I'd even want it if it were 1ms vs 3ms.
It makes the difference between buying one box with NVRAM, or 3 boxes
without it.
I can understand why sun would want us to buy three boxes. But forcing us
to, rather smacks of the M-word :-<