[hinkley]

Very early on in my enterprise career, in a continuance of a discussion where it was mentioned that our customer was contemplating a terabyte disk array (that would fill an entire server rack, so very fucking early) I learned about the great grandfather of NVME drives: battery backed RAM disks that cost $40k inflation adjusted.

“Why on earth would you spend the cost of a brand new sedan on a drive like this?” I asked. Answer: to put the Oracle or DB2 WAL data on so you could vertically scale your database just that much higher while you tried to solve the throughput problems you were having another way. It was either the bargaining phase of loss or a Hail Mary you could throw in to help a behind-schedule rearchitecture. Last resort vertical scaling.