Block storage is dead, says ex-HP and Supermicro data bigwig

really?

"In the early days of disk drives, the fastest access was when the data was in contiguous blocks that could be read sequentially off the disk drive"

Not true. Because the disks couldn't be read fast enough to make a continuous read from disk, so the placement of data onto the disk, when optimized, took the processor limitations into account. He, of all people, should remember this.

...ninja'd again...

Object can be faster, but UDP?

i agree with most of the points

yes, Object can be faster than block and is the future, most block vendors use some form of versioned b-tree, object or K/V use faster Hash, the current implementations of object over file are not really efficient since they double the overhead and add a slow HTTP protocol in front.

yes, we need metadata, it can be coded in yet another K/V set, K/V is not an alternative to Object which have indexed and extensible metadata, security, management, tiering, EC/RAID/DR, .. but rather the best underline tech to store the object chunks.

Note that a big advantage of K/V is eliminating the "double fragmentation" in Flash hardware, i wish some of the NVMe or NVMe over Fabric (Eth) guys will extend their APIs to K/V. many new age apps are already using K/V (in the form of RocksDB or alike) since its faster to develop with and leaves the hard problem to someone else. having hardware K/V is the natural evolution.

re UDP, don't think it works at scale, Coraid pioneered similar notion and are now closed, you must have ways to deal with network congestion, and have mechanisms like TCP congestion win .., or RDMA credits and congestion avoidance.

a key problem with Kinetic is the CPU overhead on the client side, lets assume i access many drives or flash it would eat up all my CPU, vs a SAS HBA or NVMe which do 6GB/s all in hardware.

for that reason i think NVMe over fabric (RDMA) or Intel Omni-path will be more efficient when it comes to remote Flash or remote K/V.

Yaron

SDSBlog.com

IIR Hollerith punch cards derive from Jaquard punch cards used for controlling mechanical looms.

My thoughts exactly.

Computers use zeros and ones and this isn't going to go away any time soon. Disk drives and memory, whether the flash type or the RAM type do the same. There's always going to be a translation from how you want to read and write your data into those zeros and ones. All that's up for debate is where you do that translation and whether it is done more than once, with intermediate layers. Translating as few times as possible will generally lead to better performance, at the expense of portability. That's why some applications use raw devices, and at the other extreme we have virtualisation layers such as those found in dedicated appliances, LVMs or advanced file systems like ZFS and BTRFS. These get in the way and will inevitably affect performance, but they allow you to do clever shit.

They're still linear arrays of bytes...

Agreed there are a lot of changes coming in storage, and I agree with Robert that the entrenched players may not be moving fast enough. What else is new in the tech industry?

As to storage, a disk drive is a linear array of bytes. Historically, we've used a file system to recursively divide that linear array of bytes into a collection of smaller linear arrays of bytes. Or disk arrays to stripe logical disks across physical disks (striping logical linear arrays of bytes across physical linear arrays of bytes). Object storage is yet another collection of smaller linear arrays of bytes (the objects).

A USB stick (which by the way is the replacement for the removable disk drive) is just another linear array of bytes.

Flash, or more generally nonvolatile memory DIMMs, are simply a new physical linear array of bytes to store smaller linear arrays of bytes (objects, files, whatever).

Agreed that how we organize and access the smaller linear arrays of bytes within the larger physical ones may change.

Oh, and accessing storage congests networks. Blindly using UDP is fatally flawed in nontrivial installations. Layering one of the emerging congestion control protocols over UDP is fine.

But I predict that 100 years we will still have physical devices which store linear arrays of bytes, and within them we will store smaller linear arrays of bytes. If block storage is dead, long live block storage II !

@FStevenChalmers

Thank god it's just block storage... For a moment I thought he announced tape dead.

Who really gives a sh!t these days how data is layed down on the media ?

There will always be a medium, an adressing scheme and a transport protocol.

And there will always be chief technolgists and consultants to first confuse and then enlighten the customer.

How else could you sell something as boring as storage.

The real technological breakthroughs happen material sciences labs where new media is developped.

What storage vendors do is sell Pepsi or Coke. They all cook with the same water.

If he'd just used "Laundry" instead of "Chinese Laundry" he wouldn't have had to go through all that nonsense about being Politically Incorrect.

CAM memory

IDT content addressable memory is far more exciting,

I always objected to objective symantics,

preferring simplicity and the most direct path.

Yes yes yes...

"The problem is that the data in the cloud is accessible only at WAN speeds. That is fine for the data on your phone or tablet, but unsuitable when you want to run analytic applications on archived records.

In addition, the cost of public cloud storage is deceptive. For your phone or tablet data, it is palatable. When you get into your massive data needs, the cost of retrieving cloud data overwhelms the savings of not keeping the data within the company."

This ^^ I've been telling my counterparts who are infatuated with cloud this cloud that.

You should see the uproar in end users trying to access stuff over the WAN. You can't just tell them to be patient. Also we are beginning to see the price hit as we build more servers in the cloud. The monthly bills are piling up.