[development] Re: enterprise needs

[John VanDyk]

One thing that has helped us not worry about taking the next step 
(distributed webservers, etc.) is the use of a RAID with a RAM front 
end. We use an Apple Xserve RAID (~$7,000, 
http://www.apple.com/xserve/raid/). Advantages:

- uses standard SATA drives so replacement drives are cheap (I mount 
them on the hotswappable drive carrier myself in about 5 minutes)

- 512MB RAM in front of the drives, transparent to the server. 
Battery backup protects the data in the RAM and onboard drive write 
cache is off.

What this means for our setup is that Drupal is nearly always doing 
I/O with RAM. Of course, this is dependent on your setup and use case.