The Storage Tipping Point
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The Storage Tipping Point
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Re: The Storage Tipping Point
#2Good to see Robin Harris' article on the front page of HN (we live in the same small town and a mutual friend introduced us).
A little off topic from the article: I think the biggest tipping point is the decreasing cost of cloud storage because large companies like Google do so much of their time critical processing with data in RAM (spread over many servers) and these servers can re-purpose a lot of their disk I/O capability to service low cost cloud storage.
Re: The Storage Tipping Point
#3Funny he mentioned System/38, which largely eliminated users' storage worries, then says that company's rep never heard of it. Funny cuz they still sell it: IBM i. I posted a link [1] to original system on his site. It got so many things right in a business machine it was hard to believe. That old design still has better security and reliability than Windows or Linux boxes. Most AS/400 deployments I run into just don't... have... downtime... They also pretty much manage themselves.
I'd like to see FOSS do designs like that [minus the interface & API]. The labor advantage might lead to something pretty awesome. Meanwhile, they keep building complexity on top of UNIX architecture with a few stragglers on better OS architectures. Not much hope there. Fortunately, CHERI (capability) and SAFE (tags) are each building on mechanisms System/38 used for software reliability and security. An academic team or company might build something great on top of it. Still holding out some hope!
[1] http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~levy/capabook/Chapter8.pdf
Re: The Storage Tipping Point
#4I was under the impression that the storage model in the system/38 was part of what was carried forward into the as400. Not the capability model, as much as the lack of "files" because everything is just persistent objects/segments.
Is that not the case?
But I'm not really sure how this by itself solves the problems of modern SSD's. Problems caused by two things, the differing segment/page sizes between the upper layers (OS/filesystem/database/etc) and the need to rewrite static portions of the SSD in order to wear level the entire address space. (and to a lesser extent the need to update small portions in the middle of existing pieces of data).
Its the second part that seems to be forgotten by lots of people suggesting alternatives to the current storage stack. Whats really necessary is a higher level communications protocol between the flash and the filesystem. One that provides the metadata to the ssd about the sizes of individual "objects" so that they may be keep together as atomic units. That way the flash layer knows if a write is to a larger object, or a new object itself that can be managed separately.
Re: The Storage Tipping Point
#5Funny he mentioned System/38, which largely eliminated users' storage worries, then says that company's rep never heard of it. Funny cuz they still sell it: IBM i. I posted a link [1] to original system on his site. It got so many things right in a business machine it was hard to believe. That old design still has better security and reliability than Windows or Linux boxes. Most AS/400 deployments I run into just don…
Also worth noting is that IBM i had one of (if not probably the) first implementation of containers, in the form of LPARs.
Re: The Storage Tipping Point
#6Good to see Robin Harris' article on the front page of HN (we live in the same small town and a mutual friend introduced us). A little off topic from the article: I think the biggest tipping point is the decreasing cost of cloud storage because large companies like Google do so much of their time critical processing with data in RAM (spread over many servers) and these servers can re-purpose a lot of their disk I/O c…
Can't believe I've seen two people from there on the same day on HN! Flabbergasted. Grew up there, currently living just up the rim.
Re: your comment, I'm curious to see how the I/O capacity of those servers could be distributed for cloud storage. I would imagine that even with 10Gbps if those machines are really cranking, they could have a difficult time provisioning network I/O for a storage service.
Re: The Storage Tipping Point
#7The article says that log-structured apps and filesystems conflict with underlying SSDs, because those are doing similar things and the two don't play well together. But then it says that "products that already incorporate log structured I/O will have a definite advantage" in the future. How can they have an advantage if they're conflicting with the storage layer? Is this a contradiction, or am I missing something?
Re: The Storage Tipping Point
#8The article says that log-structured apps and filesystems conflict with underlying SSDs, because those are doing similar things and the two don't play well together. But then it says that "products that already incorporate log structured I/O will have a definite advantage" in the future. How can they have an advantage if they're conflicting with the storage layer? Is this a contradiction, or am I missing something?
The paper [0] has some suggestions: an API (already existing and somewhat supported, called TRIM) to tell the disk that certain sectors are no longer in use, and atomic writes.
I guess I buy the claim that you're better off starting with a log-structured file system that will use new APIs to allocate and free chunks on the SSD, than to use a conventional file system that the SSD tries to optimize
[0] https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/inflow14/infl...
Re: The Storage Tipping Point
#9Funny he mentioned System/38, which largely eliminated users' storage worries, then says that company's rep never heard of it. Funny cuz they still sell it: IBM i. I posted a link [1] to original system on his site. It got so many things right in a business machine it was hard to believe. That old design still has better security and reliability than Windows or Linux boxes. Most AS/400 deployments I run into just don…
Also worth noting is that IBM i had one of (if not probably the) first implementation of containers, in the form of LPARs.
True. Add that many "inventions" in virtualization field were in VM/370 in... the 70's. Including running itself on itself which has been celebrated in several news articles for different prototypes over the past few years. Except that was a production system. ;)
Re: The Storage Tipping Point
#10I think the storage company Nimble may have figured this out.