Storage networks slowing down access to data
Add to 
del.icio.us
 Digg this
Get a great Ubuntu Linux dedicated server for less than $3 a day!
Share on Twitter
Jan. 4, 2012
There's more and more evidence today that storage area networks (SANs) are slowing down access to vital corporate data,
and PCIe flash DASs beat SAN and NAS systems nine times out of ten, and are rapidly increasing in popularity in the IT
community.
To be sure, some in the industry still call PCIe flash with the moniker 'storage memory' but it's still very fast
direct-access storage. It provides applications in servers much faster access to stored data than if it was stored on
SANs and NASs.
A typical hard drive can do 250 or so IOPS. Flash can do hundreds of thousands of IOPS. However, this obscures networked
storage's advantages where many servers need to share data (NAS) or a large storage resource (SAN).
The networked storage issue, when compared to flash DAS, is two fold. First, the hard driveshave seek time latency as
well as low IOPS rates, and the network adds its own latency to make matters worse. And solid state drives (SSDs) in a networked
array have the same network latency issues, although they have the IOPS rate advantage over disk.
But network latency isn't really the real evil in networked storage access. Really, the two major issues here are disk
seek times and low IOPS numbers.
In sequential I/O, disks are fast, but in today's world IOPS seem to be rated more highly than MB/sec. Overall, virtualized
multi-core and multi-threaded servers are inherently very impatient. They need data for the apps in their virtual machines
instantly.
Now that CPU cycles cost a lot less than before, they are treated as the most precious resource in the data center.
It's all about time and cloud computing and centralization of application software.
Downstream, the focus is moving to networked storage arrays, now becoming flash-enhanced storage arrays and even all-flash
storage arrays, getting better at serving PCIe flash. And network latency may well become the villain of the whole puzzle,
prompting general moves to 16 Gbit/s Fibre Channel and 40 Gbit/s Ethernet.
That's currently the thinking of the industry on storage, and PCIe flash is the storage industry's great new hope. It
will be interesting to see how fast and to what extent the IT industry will fix these critical issues.
In other hi tek news
The last ten years were all about open source. Now you can expect that the next decade will be all about open APIs
(application programming interfaces). But as with open source software, APIs aren't necessarily a guarantee of immediate
success to those that participate.
Some will succeed and some will fail. The exact outcome will be determined by who gives software developers the best access to data, and that access is a
function of open APIs. Like proprietary software, there are proprietary APIs, and those will continue to be closed as
they've been in the past, with maybe a few exceptions. But open APIs will be like what open source has been since
about the year 2000.
Some countries may focus on new ways to get consumers to spend more money in an effort to rebuild their economies,
but the world's economies are increasingly dependent upon software services that are created by programmers and developers.
These software developers are behind many of the important creations of the 21st Century: Google, Twitter, Facebook
and a few more. And in order to to succeed, such developers need APIs-- lots of them in fact. And most importantly, they
all need to be standardized and well-documented if they are to work well and integrate themselves seamlessly in the rapidly
expanding internet community.
Given the importance of today APIs, it is still surprising to see just how difficult it can be to release them on a
timely basis, and to make sure that they are always updated to the latest production version. API software is sometimes
initiated without any noise or fanfare, but carefully nurtured by its true believers, then slipped into beta, then into
production, and then brought to the awareness of senior management after the API was demonstrated to be a success.
So in essence, API developers sometimes have to secretly develop for their business to be successful, and most times
they cannot be certain in any way if the API will ever succeed in the first place.
Overall, one of the greatest benefits of APIs is how much they can help with the integration of software services at
the core of a specific application. For example, think of software that runs behind a firewall or other similar piece of
hardware.
For all the positive benefits from so-called public APIs, the real revolution is that enterprises of all sizes are
API-enabling their back-end systems. This makes that organization permeable to partners but also to its own employees,
and is the number one reason why enterprises today are embracing APIs in droves.
Source: Linux News Today.
Add to
del.icio.us
Digg this
Get a great Ubuntu Linux dedicated server for less than $3 a day!
Share on Twitter
| 
