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19 February 2007 This year will be a busy one for us as we integrate our software and hardware. Within the next two to three months we will have a prototype rack, desktop computer, and cells on which we will be able to demonstrate our custom built operating system. Installations are targeted towards the latter half of this year. We plan to upload photographs to this website soon, so any of you who are interested in scaleable, silent hardware running open source software should return to this website regularly in order to keep abreast of developments. 1 February 2007 Our unique, clustered, solid-state system has been in development for about three years. We will soon reach the prototype stage, and we will then be in a position to demonstrate the equipment to interested parties. We know that most small companies begin thinking about replacing their IT systems six months to one year prior to implementation. If you fall into this category, or you are a small “start up” looking to implement your first system, and you would like a small, silent, reliable system with no software licensing issues, then please contact us and we will be happy to arrange a demonstration. FAQs Q1 Why aren't your systems installed with hard drives? A1 Generally we try to use only flash storage which makes the systems small, totally silent, and, in our opinion, more reliable. Our only concession to mechanical devices is a slimline DVD drive for automatic backups. Ideally, this should be programmed to run at night. Q2 If there are no hard drives installed then where will all my data be stored? A2 On a small system with light use, such as word processing and web browsing, we can usually provide sufficient flash storage. However, on a system where large quantities of data need to be stored, perhaps in a database, the cost of supplying flash storage with large capacities becomes uneconomical. In such a case we can attach a remote hard drive rack via ATA over Ethernet. This is now an accepted standard which is built into recent Linux 2.6 kernels. However, as the price of flash media continues to fall then the reliance upon hard drives for data storage will decrease over time. Q3 What about reliability? Is flash storage as reliable as a hard disk? A3 We have found our flash media to be extremely reliable. Generally speaking, mechanical components, such as those used by hard disk drives and optical drives, have a shorter life expectancy than electronic components. As an example, our flash modules have an MTBF (mean time before failure) of 1,000,000 hours whereas a typical hard disk is rated at 500,000 hours. Flash storage is also much more rugged. It is not affected by shock to the same degree as a mechanical hard drive, so if you drop the case your data should still be accessible. Write cycles used to be a weakness with flash media, but the situation has improved greatly in recent years. Our flash storage is rated at 1,000,000 write cycles, with a ten year guarantee on data integrity. Nevertheless, we have significantly reduced the number of write cycles necessary by the implemention of two measures. Firstly, we have created a read-only operating system running in a ram drive. This also makes the system more secure as data and the operating system are kept entirely separate. Secondly, by using more RAM we have removed the need for a swap partition. © Cellularity Limited 2006 - 2007 Cellularity Limited: Registered in England No.05657074 Registered Office: The Old Forge | 37 East Street | Colchester | Essex CO1 2TP | UK