Oh no its cool, perty good ideas there too. Only down side is you have to spend alot for thos ram drives and raids or in the case of the ram drive, only so much can be stored there. I was sorta going for a cheaper route that could just use what was inside your network anyways. Maybe 2 more hard drives but wasn't needed. As far as I know, I could be really wrong, how could you have 200+ on a a network array? Less you mean just for the server not the network it self.
Yea, its read ahead data (read data) so dont have to worry about as much. System/server can take care of all that (if aka one pc went down it still has that little bit of information off site on another pc or a "backup" hard drive that you set just for that), so no human hands have to even touch it. Not sure if letting write data be put into the cloud of ram would be a good thing but would help in speed test by a long shot. I would have a UPS too, for anything to do with write. Could fake the BBU write back (if your raid doesn't have one) by arraying a hard drive or 2 to it too. This way any write data is saved off site of the ram cloud and can be access if power went out.
You could do TCP/IP, UDP, or even a P2P? I think combine of TCP and P2P would work the best.
Basicly (just a example) how I think it would work is:
Server/Network: 6 hard drives (2 hard drvies on their own (could be raid), rest in a raid), 4-6GB of ram, server os, eboostr server software, 1GB network ran by switches and routes, no hubs. *The network needs to be this fast, cause like you said thats only around 90MB/s + or -, the 2 hard that are on their own will be used to back up our cache that we build and write cache if we turn that feature on. Also, most of the network computers have to be clones, not xp and vista, 32 64 bit, this way you dont have to worry about witch file goes to what os type*
1. The client version of eboostr will be installed on the client computers of your network.
2. Server will have a server version of eboostr that controls the client versions.
3. Server will say I want xx amount from each computer to be used for our cloud ram drive.
4. Client eboostr sets xx amount of ram from its pc and tells the server done and waiting for cache data.
5. Server gets all the information about how much ram there is on the network and also checks how long thos computers are usally "up". Then see what can be cache and trys to fill the cloud of ram with the cache. It tells each client its data for that pc starting from the ones that are usally are on the longist to the shortest. It also saves this cache on a hard drive so it can be access if one of the clients gos down.
6. Client saves the data into its ram that it got from the server.
7. If one of the client computers shutdown or goes down, server makes a note and sends this note to all the computers running eboostr client to ask the server instead for this information. OR Server tells a different client to have this information.
1. Client computer has start a program.
2. Client eboostr knows from a list that its data was cache on the network.
3. Client eboostr ask for that data from the other clients or server if the client that had the information went down.
4. Other Clients send its data as fast as it can to the one that requested it.
5. Client program should run/load faster.
6. Network data goes back to normal untill nexts request for data.