Newsflash

Solid State disks are becomming cheaper and more functional than ever before. The SSD has a faster access time and read time than a regular hard disk. The SSD are inferior to hard disks in the speed of writing data to them, but this can be overcome by rewritting the low level routins to take advantage of the SSD write characteristics to improve the data write performance of the SSD to that of the hard disk dirve.

SSD disk drives are more reliable, have wider operational temperature ranges and can sustain higher operation shock that a regular hard disk drive. By placing the SSD disks in a RAID 6 configuration two of the 5 SSD disks can fail without losing any operational integrity. This would allow a failed disk to be returned to Sumo Computer for replacement without completely compromising the disk array integrity.

Within the next 18 months new FLASH memory technologies will provide SSD disk drives with greater capacity and higher speeds than today.  

 
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Written by Jon Kristofferson   
Sunday, 14 October 2007

Sumo Computer was formed on the basis that there will always be a market for a powerful computer that is both low power and in a small package. We first started out with the Kruo Box from Revolution. It was the ideal platform for computer room applications that needed a headless server. We placed a high capacity disk drive in the Kuro Box and added Gentoo Linux and sold this small and powerful computer on the internet for a few hundred dollars.

We met with limit success in the marketing of the computer, but ended up with a very happy customer base. Sumo Computer configured the headless server with the clients information so that it was simply plug and play with their network. Gentoo Linux provided an excellent  platform for the Kuro Box. With over 10,000 applications that would run on the PPC Kuro box is was a spectacular computer system.

The Kuro Box was comming up short and Sumo Computer was being bootstrapped from the proceeds of a part time consulting business.

To remedy these problems, Sumo Computer is looking for seed capital in the amount of a line of credit for 2 million dollars. 

Kuro Box Shortcommings:

  • The Kuro Box was operating at 233 Mhz and with 128 Mb of memory.
  • A single 10/100/1000 ethernet port.
  • Gentoo Linux was not 100% Kuro Box ready at the time we started.
  • Revolution had internal issues that made dealing with them difficult.
  • Public assumption was that a monitor/keyboard/mouse we required to be called a computer.
  • Not all of the source code was open source.
  • The Kuro Box lacked the standard PPC U-Boot boot loader.

Improvements needed to continue:

  • Faster more powerful processing capabilities.
  • More memory for running larger applications.
  • More network interfaces.
  • A method for clustering the computers together to create a more powerful system.
  • A faster and more reliable disk subsystem.
  • A full U-Boot implementation.
  • 100% Gentoo Linux integration.
  • 100% Open Source.

The end result is the Jonidan project.
Last Updated ( Sunday, 14 October 2007 )
 
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