by dave on November 3, 2008
In developing the Future Storage System series, I have been trying to take a part of my excitement for storage technologies and overlay them with systems/platform technology. Typically, the storage industry lags on the platform development side of the house (mostly out of necessity). So, part of looking at the Future Storage System was to take into consideration that in the basic design, some of the more current technologies could and should be used to enable “forward” thinking. That’s why you see such a heavy emphasis on Torrenza, Hypertransport, and integrated memory controllers. With the exception of Torrenza, each of the other aspects of system design have a rich history. Hypertransport, arguably, has been an outlier on the bus technology side, but it’s capabilities and industry support are unparalleled. Integrated memory controllers, while “nothing new” (DEC Alpha, anyone?) really came to the for when AMD introduced them as part of the Athlon series of processors. Today, I’d like to toss another wrinkle into the “platform meets storage” discussion by including another developing technology: the GPU (Graphical Processing Unit).
[click to continue…]
by dave on October 22, 2008
n Parts 1-4 of the Future Storage Systems articles, we focused on the SAN-facing technologies that would enable scalable propcessing growth, purpose-built technologies for deduplication and encryption, as well as the fabric that would tie nodes together. However, in each of these articles, I never got into WHERE that information would eventually be stored. Today, I’m hoping to remedy that problem. I’ll be referencing the diagram below as usual.
FSS Backend Disk Layout Options
[click to continue…]
by dave on October 17, 2008
Since I started this article series, I’ve had the awesome opportunity to have my ideas (well, some of the early articles at least) reviewed by person(s) who deal with the actual infrastructure of storage systems day in, day out. The benefit of such peer review is that you get to learn at the symbolic “feet” of the masters and discover flaws, omissions, and understated features that need to be understood and incorporated. This post is dedicated to some of those discussions and, where applicable, my understanding of how the FSS either incorporates or misses the boat.
[click to continue…]
