Here's a crazy thought: Is there a way to make a server identify itself as a *harddrive* on the SCSI bus? If so, we could take a machine with lots of RAM which does nothing else than holding most of the DB in cache (cheaper and faster than Compact Flash:-) and occasionally write stuff to its hard drives. Probably won't need much of a CPU, and maybe not even SCSI drives, just cheap IDE ones, as all it does is caching.
Then, we could plug that thing into the "real" DB server, which just sees a really fast HD.
Well, one can dream...
I think I remember reading about projects fairly similar to this many years ago. However, I don't think they went anywhere. I imagine people realized that if it costs $10k to build a generic machine that can handle these disks, and a huge number of hours to configure it and get it running, then you were probably better off buying a more reliable $15k external disk system.
-- Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN