Live data from Hacker News

Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet

speakingofclouds.com

111–120 of 122 posts

Re: Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes that is really slow

Actually modern switches have 400ns latency. Is that too slow? Hardware PTP support in your switches can get you clocks synced to close to a nanosecond accuracy, surely that's good enough?

Re: Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet

#112
post #27

I hope it will support IPv6. The article mentions DHCP and has an example address of 1.2.3.4, but IPv4 seems like a poor choice for a new LAN protocol in 2013. Not everyone has IPv6 internet connectivity but we do all have IPv6 LAN. Apple has been using IPv6 for local network services for years now, like file sharing and Time Capsule backups, and it works great.

Well on an internal network ipv4 is more than enough. With subnets you can put a LOT of hosts on your private network without any problems.

Re: Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet

#113
post #27

I hope it will support IPv6. The article mentions DHCP and has an example address of 1.2.3.4, but IPv4 seems like a poor choice for a new LAN protocol in 2013. Not everyone has IPv6 internet connectivity but we do all have IPv6 LAN. Apple has been using IPv6 for local network services for years now, like file sharing and Time Capsule backups, and it works great.

Well on an internal network ipv4 is more than enough. With subnets you can put a LOT of hosts on your private network without any problems.

IPv4 is not just about larger address space. It has better autoconfiguration, better multicast, better MTU, and it has a constant size header to make routing easier. Unlike IPv4, it works well with no centralized server assigning IP addresses - between link-local addresses and multicast, you get everything you need to communicate locally, automatically. It is a good protocol and we should use it because it is good, not just because address space exhaustion forces us to.

Re: Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet

#114

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,…

hard drives are already run by arm controllers http://hackaday.com/2013/08/02/sprite_tm-ohm2013-talk-hackin... so your idea might happen sooner than expected

Yes... given they use the same connector on the HDD, I'm wondering if they actually need to change the hardware at all!

The sprite breakdown identifies one core as managing the SAS commands, via DMA. Now how hard would it be to actually manage ethernet similarly, via a ARM core? If that's what they've actually done, that's really damn cool.

Re: Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet

#115
post #27

I hope it will support IPv6. The article mentions DHCP and has an example address of 1.2.3.4, but IPv4 seems like a poor choice for a new LAN protocol in 2013. Not everyone has IPv6 internet connectivity but we do all have IPv6 LAN. Apple has been using IPv6 for local network services for years now, like file sharing and Time Capsule backups, and it works great.

IPv6 has gigantic variable-length headers. That is inefficient, and too hard to implement in FPGA/silicon for a niche exploratory project.

Re: Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet

#116

1) Hard drive industry was the main example cited in Innovator's Dilemma. 2) Various posts pooh-pooh'ing this development (including the current top post) here are committing the classic mistake described in that book made by incumbents which leads to disruption by new entrants to the market. 3) Seagate is doing something right. It doesn't guarantee that they'll win the next phase of the storage battle but they are d…

The problem is, this isn't innovation. NASD did the same thing better fourteen years ago. Disruption could still occur if somebody would evolve those ideas in a way that makes it suit users' needs better, but AFAICT Seagate is doing the exact opposite. It's difference for the sake of difference, "disrupting" only their own business.

Re: Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet

#117

1) Hard drive industry was the main example cited in Innovator's Dilemma. 2) Various posts pooh-pooh'ing this development (including the current top post) here are committing the classic mistake described in that book made by incumbents which leads to disruption by new entrants to the market. 3) Seagate is doing something right. It doesn't guarantee that they'll win the next phase of the storage battle but they are d…

The problem is, this isn't innovation. NASD did the same thing better fourteen years ago. Disruption could still occur if somebody would evolve those ideas in a way that makes it suit users' needs better, but AFAICT Seagate is doing the exact opposite. It's difference for the sake of difference, "disrupting" only their own business.

Jeff, if you look at my linkedin profile, you might notice that I have some background with object storage systems. I'm not familiar with any incarnation of NASD or a similar system that was sold as individual disks accessible over IP.

If they do end up selling it as individual disks directly pluggable into standard racks (with some easy means of supplying power), this certainly would count as a potentially disruptive innovation. As I said before, whether market reacts positively or not is not certain, but it never is. But kudos to Seagate for trying it.

Re: Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet

#118

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...

Which is my point, this is well over an order of magnitude more expensive than what the 1Gb consumer switches people would buy for home use.

Well, I suppose it depends on what you mean by 'affordable'. 10G is now affordable for small businesses, when up until recently it was strictly the domain of the large datacenter. I wouldn't put it in my house yet, but I see no reason to assume that 10G copper switches won't get to that price point eventually.

Re: Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, this isn't innovation. NASD did the same thing better fourteen years ago. Disruption could still occur if somebody would evolve those ideas in a way that makes it suit users' needs better, but AFAICT Seagate is doing the exact opposite. It's difference for the sake of difference, "disrupting" only their own business.

Jeff, if you look at my linkedin profile, you might notice that I have some background with object storage systems. I'm not familiar with any incarnation of NASD or a similar system that was sold as individual disks accessible over IP. If they do end up selling it as individual disks directly pluggable into standard racks (with some easy means of supplying power), this certainly would count as a potentially disruptiv…

You're right that NASD never became a standalone product, but at least the design was technically complete enough to be the basis for real systems (e.g. Panasas).

A technology is only disruptive if it provides some benefit over existing alternatives. Will Kinetic be cheaper than today's drives paired with tiny ARM servers (the storage-industry disruption that is already upon us)? We won't know until Seagate actually sets prices and tries to sell some, but it doesn't seem particularly likely. Will it be faster? Again, possible but not particularly likely. Will it allow higher density and/or lower power consumption? Will it be easier to build applications on top of this new and limited API than on top of the ones we already have? Without a credible positive answer to any of these questions, how is this disruptive?

If Seagate had done this right, especially wrt security and semantics beyond get/put, this might be a better building block for a whole system. That might be disruptive. But they've made such a poor start technically that if they make a dent at all it might well be someone else who achieves the actual market breakthrough. Once Seagate has done all of the marketing, that makes it far easier for someone with a better actual implementation to succeed. Look forward to the WD/HGST Object Drive, with an API that allows you to use one securely without a server to do read-modify-write and metadata management for you. Then I'll cheer.

Re: Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet

#120
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also SSDs implement an internal filesystem optimized for flash that emulates a block device to the outside. For this Kinetic Store, the controller would be quite likely even simpler.

There would still be a need for ssd specific wear leveling and trim logic in the controller though

Trim is not needed if the disc directly gets delete commands, while wear leveling is actually a problem of spinning-optimized filesystems and can be solved easier if the external representation is a key-value store of immutable objects.
Post reply on HN