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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

#91
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, technically you can now get into 10Gb for around $150 per port. http://www.amazon.com/Netgear-12-Port-ProSafe-Gigabit-Switch...

you must factor in the sfp+ module, around $200. So a complete port would be $350, $700 for a point to point link. Thunderbolt is cheaper

No, that switch is 10G copper, no sfp+ required. Thunderbolt and 10G ethernet aren't really competing in the same space, so I'm not sure why you brought it up.

Re: Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fibre is not required to beat the 2.5Gb/s limit. Standard copper Cat 6a cables already support 10Gb/s for distances up to 100m.

If people have 6A and you use a large amount more power. For an application like a hard drive the power consumption of the ethernet connection would be more than the rest of the system probably.

So use twinax.

Re: Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet

#93
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/

Basically came here to say the same thing, I like Geoff but this isn't "new" in that sense. The "newness" here is that Seagate just put it into their base board controller. Had they been a bit smarter about it they would have put in two Ethernet PHYs and then you could dual port the drive, much like the old DSSI drives from DEC.

Routing is also a non-issue since a single drive on the network is about as useful as a single drummer in a marching band, basically you're going to need at least three to make something with a bit of reliability, and more if you want efficient reliability. So between your actual storage 'processor' and the storage 'elements' you drop in a cheap bit of Broadcom silicon to make a 48 port GbE switch and voila, your much more reliable than SATA and much cheaper than FC.

I'm sure tho that the folks at Google are all over this. :-)

Re: Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet

#94

I'm waiting for stereo components that connect to each other via an Ethernet cable and a hub. Imagine a CD player, turntable, receiver, preamp, etc., that all have only two connectors: power, and Ethernet. You wouldn't have problems anymore with running out of connections on the back of your receiver. That incredible rats nest of disparate wires and cables would be gone. No more RCA cables, coax cables, HDMI, optical…

problem with audio is delay. even all analog you already had delays (granted some of the analogs are acumulators so...) but all the formats you see in audio are just lots of people, all with differents ideas of trade offs for delay and easy of use. you are on the far right... so do not invent a new one and use what we already have there, which is optical i think.

Re: Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet

#95
post #28

I wish SD cards would implement a key-value storage interface natively. It would instantly remove the need to implement a filesystem in many embedded systems eg. music players: all they need is access to keys (song filenames) and values (blob of ogg/mp3 data).

Classical Forth systems worked that way. Being Forth, they of course went for minimalism here. Keys were unsigned ints (actually, ints interpreted as unsigned) and all values were 1024 bytes (see http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ForthBlocks)

Programming that way was fun, but I wouldn't want to use it on a system with megabytes of RAM. Embedded, it would be fun to implement what you describe on top of that, though.

Re: Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet

#96
post #94

I'm waiting for stereo components that connect to each other via an Ethernet cable and a hub. Imagine a CD player, turntable, receiver, preamp, etc., that all have only two connectors: power, and Ethernet. You wouldn't have problems anymore with running out of connections on the back of your receiver. That incredible rats nest of disparate wires and cables would be gone. No more RCA cables, coax cables, HDMI, optical…

problem with audio is delay. even all analog you already had delays (granted some of the analogs are acumulators so...) but all the formats you see in audio are just lots of people, all with differents ideas of trade offs for delay and easy of use. you are on the far right... so do not invent a new one and use what we already have there, which is optical i think.

This. I once tried to repurpose an old Mac as a karaoke machine. Figured I could use the mac's built-in mic input. Absolutely unusable because of the ~50ms delay. Ended up having to buy a little analog mixer to make it work.

Re: Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet

#97
post #28

I wish SD cards would implement a key-value storage interface natively. It would instantly remove the need to implement a filesystem in many embedded systems eg. music players: all they need is access to keys (song filenames) and values (blob of ogg/mp3 data).

Database as a file system. In some ways it actually makes an odd sort of sense...

    SELECT * FROM sdc
    WHERE Type='mp3';
I could see uses for something like that. You could even treat it like a traditional file system for fallback purposes, if one of the tags was a 'directory' tag.

Also, it would make sense in cases where you have... [whatever the equivalent for NUMA is for disks. NUDA? Things like hard drives with a limited flash cache.] Store the indexes on the flash or in RAM (periodically backed up to the disk, of course). Biggest issue would be wear on the flash, though.

Re: Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet

#98
post #35

I'm seriously skeptical of this protocol performance. Ethernet and TCP/IP induce a pretty heavy overhead. This overhead is totally acceptable in LAN/WAN networks, but in case of storage network you want to keep latencies as low as possible.

It's not about performance, it's about getting into the intelligence game.

Re: Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet

#99
post #94

I'm waiting for stereo components that connect to each other via an Ethernet cable and a hub. Imagine a CD player, turntable, receiver, preamp, etc., that all have only two connectors: power, and Ethernet. You wouldn't have problems anymore with running out of connections on the back of your receiver. That incredible rats nest of disparate wires and cables would be gone. No more RCA cables, coax cables, HDMI, optical…

problem with audio is delay. even all analog you already had delays (granted some of the analogs are acumulators so...) but all the formats you see in audio are just lots of people, all with differents ideas of trade offs for delay and easy of use. you are on the far right... so do not invent a new one and use what we already have there, which is optical i think.

Modern (wired) LANs have < 1ms round-trip latency. Is that still too slow?

Re: Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet

#100
post #94

I'm waiting for stereo components that connect to each other via an Ethernet cable and a hub. Imagine a CD player, turntable, receiver, preamp, etc., that all have only two connectors: power, and Ethernet. You wouldn't have problems anymore with running out of connections on the back of your receiver. That incredible rats nest of disparate wires and cables would be gone. No more RCA cables, coax cables, HDMI, optical…

problem with audio is delay. even all analog you already had delays (granted some of the analogs are acumulators so...) but all the formats you see in audio are just lots of people, all with differents ideas of trade offs for delay and easy of use. you are on the far right... so do not invent a new one and use what we already have there, which is optical i think.

I've talked with an electrical engineer who works for QSC on the part of their business that deals with large, coordinated installations. They run huge, theme park-sized systems over COTS networking gear (read: Ethernet) with audio synced within hundreds of nanoseconds at locations hundreds of meters apart. It's doable, but you're not going to see it in normal consumer hardware.
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