As I thought more about the topic of my last post – how far the storage industry has come since its inception – another point occurred to me.  While disk drive capacity and cost achievements have been incredible, orders of magnitude improvement, disk drive performance gains are unremarkable – especially when you compare them to the significant advances in CPU and network performance.

Now, I don’t want to receive an inbox full of angry emails (angry comments are welcomed!) about this, so let me make it clear that I truly appreciate the technological challenges and the progress that has been made towards reducing disk latency and positioning times.  But, at the end of the day performance improvement is less than 40x in nearly 50 years!  This compares to multiple orders of magnitude improvement in CPU performance during the same period.

Amdahl’s (other) Law requires that I/O performance improve at the same rate as CPU performance to maintain balanced system performance.  However, with the lag in disk drive performance I/O over the years, what we have now is a growing gap that system designers have had to cope with in their attempt to balance system performance.   The result:  the birth of new industries so that the system designers can add additional hardware – such as cache and RAID together with short-stroking and over-provisioning the disk drives – in an attempt to overcome the performance and reliability shortfalls due to the mechanical nature of HDD’s.

While these approaches do improve performance to some degree, they also carry a significant cost to customers.  This is due not only to the cost of the additional hardware and software but increased system complexity, increased power consumption, reduced reliability, increased floor space, increased maintenance expense, and on and on.  What is the true cost of HDD performance….it is anybody’s guess, but I’d argue that it is far greater than what is generally believed!

I believe that this is the most important data storage issue that needs to be addressed.   In particular, how can the industry solve the I/O performance problem without even more patches (e.g., more cache) and ever increasing over provisioning? 

I have some thoughts that I’ll share next time.  In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you.

Amyl Ahola

I was recently going through some storage Web sites and came across a press release from 1961 about a new file I remember seeing when I first worked in the storage industry.  It was an announcement from Bryant about a new “High-Speed Parallel-Access Disk File.”  It was a disk drive with nearly 80 MBs that weighed 1700 lbs and sold for over $100,000.  And, this was back when 100 grand was real money.

The release got me thinking about the history of the storage industry and all the major milestones and breakthroughs over the past four decades.  All I can say, is WOW, we’ve come a very long way!  When you look at the capacity that can be stored on a device today, with over 10,000 times the capacity in less than one thousandth of the space, it’s really remarkable what this industry has accomplished.

Which brings me to the point of this post:  today, we launched a new – and I think pretty exciting – storage company, Pliant Technology (more on us later), and this blog.  I plan to use this blog as our outlet to share the experiences storage veterans and myself have  gathered over the past 40+ years (has it been that long?) in the storage industry, and provide our take on industry news, current trends and the latest technologies that are making waves.

My particular passion is analyzing where storage technology needs to go from here –particularly how it needs to evolve to higher levels of performance and efficiency to keep up with the advances of other enterprise technologies, while at the same time contributing to the WW Green effort by providing solutions enabling dramatic reductions in data center power consumption.

My goal here is to provide information that interests, challenges and even bothers you.  I’ve been in this business a long time and have seen many changes, and I’ve had the good fortune to work with some of the best in the business.  My plan is to bring all of this and more out on this blog.

I hope you’ll take the time to stop by to read, comment and even criticize on the blog.  If something strikes a chord – good or bad – I’d love to hear from you. 

Amyl Ahola