For desktop computers, Intel charges a premium on any ECC-capable gear (their Xeon line), so it's really only available in workstation class computers. Most AMD gear (AM2/3/3+ sockets, not A-series) can take ECC RAM, if there is BIOS support.
ECC RAM costs about 10-30% more per DIMM, but as memory is so incredibly cheap these days, its probably the cheapest safety net you can buy.
It's a pain in the neck. By not supporting ECC RAM, Intel is IMO indirectly responsible for millions of dollars worth of lost work from crashes on consumer hardware in workplaces worldwide. ECC RAM should be standard, given modern memory capacities.
The last two machines I built had bad modules that needed weeding out, and I follow anti-static precautions fairly carefully. I used to be a PC technician and I built probably over a hundred PCs in the 90s. Memory was never as fragile and fault-prone as it is these days.
On production servers using virtual machines to run our software is not advised.
Nevertheless, we would do our best to please a customer looking to host our software on an EC2 cluster, with the appropriate warnings. ;)
A bit of context: we sell a "real time" non-relational database (http://www.quasardb.net/). Our customers come to us for speed and reliability and therefore build dedicated farms to host our database.
Wow, that product page is completely lacking any meaningful technical information about your product. :-D
How do you stack up against the most common open source NoSQL systems? Redis, Cassandra, Mongo, Couchbase? Is your db eventually consistent, or partitioned, or replicated, or what?
Thanks for the feedback, this is currently a landing page we give to our customers we meet face to face. We're working on something more consistent to answer questions like yours.
quasardb is a key/value store.
It is (a lot) faster in a multi-client context that the engines you listed and can handle entries of any size (provided you have enough space on the servers, of course!).
It's fully symmetric which means the load is equally distributed and replicated on all the nodes (no master node).
If you have more question feel free to mail us (don't want to highjack this thread).
I did read the whole post. It was very informative. I wasn't aware that EC2 did not have ECC RAM. My question was directed at shin_lao's policy about not providing a "warranty" for his customers running on non-ECC hardware.
Nope? You seem to have misread (well, or it's me of course).
You mention EC2 in your blog post, but he asked the person requiring ECC memory or voiding the product warrany what _they'd_ do if the customer wants to run on EC2.
In fact, the GP probably used the EC2 part of your blog entry to come up with the question in the first place.
For desktop computers, Intel charges a premium on any ECC-capable gear (their Xeon line), so it's really only available in workstation class computers. Most AMD gear (AM2/3/3+ sockets, not A-series) can take ECC RAM, if there is BIOS support.
ECC RAM costs about 10-30% more per DIMM, but as memory is so incredibly cheap these days, its probably the cheapest safety net you can buy.