bypass?
[Note: I used to work in the storage industry, but have been out of touch for 10 years.]
Typically a storage system sits between the consumer machines and the raw disk drives. So, I/O's have to go through buffers in the storage system when going in either direction. That doesn't allow latencies as low as a raw SSD device. So, they must be doing something different. Some thoughts:
Perhaps they have some custom chips that are able to reroute and rewrite I/O requests so that host requests go directly to the appropriate SSD, without having to read the data into storage system memory first. It should also be possible to use those same chips to observe the data going by and buffer it for caching purposes, if that is appropriate.
More custom silicon could perhaps allow them to rewrite, on-the-fly, FibreChannel requests into SATA/whatever requests to the actual disks.
If this is not what they are doing, I'm curious to find out. And if its not, and anyone uses the above to make money, please send some of that money my way - I could use it!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
