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Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet

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Re: Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet

#51
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It communicates over ethernet, which is what matters. So it doesn't matter that much, and people understand what it means -- in the same way it doesn't matter you just said "IP protocol", which expands to "internet protocol protocol".

But IP runs over more than just ethernet or is it limited only run on ethernet?

No, for example you could also run IP on DOCSIS, which is typically employed by cable modems. Or you could run it on an 802.15.4 stack, using 6LoWPAN (in the RF world, and lately also narrowband PLC such as G3).

Remember that IP is layer 3 in the OSI model, and you could run it on top of other layer 2 implementations than Ethernet.

Re: Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet

#52
post #49

This seems like a reinvention of Coraid's ATAoE, which has the added benefit of already being in the mainline kernel, good server/target support (vblade), hardware products shipping now, a lack of IP/TCP overhead, and a dead-simple protocol. http://aoetools.sourceforge.net/

Note that while the lack of TCP/IP overhead may be helpful, it also means you don't get any routeing - often one of the pains of using FCoE.

Re: Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet

#53
post #21
post #14

I don't think this can be seen as a possible replacement for PC disk because of it's high latency. Beside unless you are very rich Ethernet is only 1Gbit/s. On the oher hand I see an opportunity as shared storage for mobile and ligthweight devices. Using a single and simple protocol, compared to NAS, could open a new technology domain and market. Of course it requires also a good integrated authentication and access…

Gigabit ethernet used to be ungodly expensive. Once 40G or 100G ethernet starts hitting production switches, 10G will start to become economical.

I'm wondering if 10G really will become economical any time soon (for consumer products).

It's been around a long time now, much longer than 1Gb was around until it started becoming consumer products. 10Gb still uses quite a lot of power, and consumer demand is virtually absent since the 10x speed we got from 100Mb to 1Gb has been "fast enough" for home users, and will be for many years.

Re: Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet

#54

OK, so head 'sploding a little... this is basically a hardware implementation of a Redis/MongoDb key/value store yes? If so, wow... yes... the world needs more of this, I think. Wonder if you could get it to conform to AWS S3 interface too?

MongoDb is a document store, not a key/value store.

Re: Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet

#55
post #49

This seems like a reinvention of Coraid's ATAoE, which has the added benefit of already being in the mainline kernel, good server/target support (vblade), hardware products shipping now, a lack of IP/TCP overhead, and a dead-simple protocol. http://aoetools.sourceforge.net/

Note that while the lack of TCP/IP overhead may be helpful, it also means you don't get any routeing - often one of the pains of using FCoE.

It is entirely possible to encapsulate ethernet frames into whatever protocol you like, should routing be your desire.

The 99% use case of storage access requires no such frills, though.

Re: Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet

#56
post #26

I don't understand why this is branded as a Ethernet protocol when it's a IP protocol

"The physical interconnect to the disk drive is now Ethernet." I don't know if the new standard requires Ethernet, but I would be very surprised to see any other interconnect on these drives.

Re: Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet

#57
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, I thought it would be some storage reinvented by Aryans

Every American will think it's California... Start typing Uber A... into google and what do you get?

"Uber" is a misspelling. The word is über, or ueber.

Re: Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet

#58
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes a very poor choice of phrase, esp when he could've used anything else. He's not alone ; this issue came up just yesterday: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/culture/davidbolt/100071146/how...

That's interesting. The word 'Sonderkommando' has no negative connotation at all in German. Is it something specific to how the British look at WW2? Or is it just the usually outrage between parties?

Yes it has. Being German, please google it.

The Sonderkommando was a special group of prisoners at Auschwitz who had to prepare and cleanup the extermination of millions of prisoners. Their job was to carry the dead from the gas chambers into the ovens. They were recycled every 3 months or so by a fresh Sonderkommando, whose first job was to murder their predecessors. They also made history by starting the only counter-attack at the camp, blowing up one of the gas chambers.

You can write "Deutschland ueber alles" all day, that's a minor issue. But using Sonderkommando in the wrong context can cause quite a stir.

Re: Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet

#59
post #42
post #2

The technical details: https://developers.seagate.com/display/KV/Kinetic+Open+Stora... The important, actual TLDR: "Kinetic Open Storage is a drive architecture in which the drive is a key/value server with Ethernet connectivity."

Also look at https://github.com/Seagate/Kinetic-Preview

Simulator done Java, with additional support for Python & Erlang! :)

Re: Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet

#60

I think this is an incredibly interesting approach, and I hope Seagate open it up a little more. If we could run some computation on the drive, that could be incredibly powerful. I can imagine that once these are SSD drives, paired with reasonably powerful (likely ARM) chips, that we'll have massively parallel storage architectures (GPU-like architectures for storage). We'll have massive aggregate CPU disk bandwidth,…

Are you munching some number crunching?
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