The performance of any system can be only as high as the oscillator that defines and maintains its stability. While timing performance, such as stability, drift, aging, and Allan deviation, are well understood, their performance is rarely employed to demonstrate the cost savings that can be achieved. For example, data centers have thousands of servers, so oscillators that can maintain high precision in the presence of shock, vibration, electrical noise, thermal gradients, acceleration, and pressure, can significantly reduce the total cost of ownership. To understand how such tiny devices deliver such impressive results, let’s focus on the characteristics of both the oscillators and the data centers themselves.
The distributed database is arguably the most common function within most data centers. As an example, we can use the ubiquitous Excel spreadsheet, which in the case of a data center, would be a truly massive document. For the purposes of our illustration, let’s assume two people bidding on an eBay item place an equal bid around and appear on the eBay server at about the same time. So, who gets the product?