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Micromoney CryptoMango?
--- begin forwarded text
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 1998 08:52:16 -0500
From: rah-web <[email protected]>
Reply-To: [email protected]
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: rah-web <[email protected]>
Subject: Micromoney CryptoMango?
http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayNew.pl?/metcalfe/metcalfe.htm
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[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.
------------------------------
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Technology pundit Bob Metcalfe invented Ethernet in 1973 and
founded 3Com in 1979, and today he specializes in the
Internet. Send e-mail to [email protected].
Missed a column? Go back for more.
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Copyright � 1998 InfoWorld Media Group Inc.
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-----------------
Robert Hettinga ([email protected]), 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'
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