"It's a real breakthrough, enabled by folks at DataCore who remember what we were working on in tech a couple of decades back."
What's old is new again. Marty McFly would get it. https://virtualizationreview.com/articles/2015/10/21/back-to-the-future-in-virtualization-and-storage.aspx
If you're on
social media this week, you've probably had your fill of references to Back
to the Future, the 1980s scifi comedy much beloved by those of us who are
now in our 50s, and the many generations of video watchers who have rented,
downloaded or streamed the film since. The nerds point out that the future
depicted in the movie, as signified by the date on the time machine clock in
the dashboard of a DeLorean, is Oct. 21, 2015. That's today, as I write this
piece…
Legacy Storage
Is Not the Problem
If you stick with x86 and virtualization, you may be concerned about the challenges of achieving decent throughput and application performance, which your hypervisor vendor has lately been blaming on legacy storage. That is usually a groundless accusation. The problem is typically located above the storage infrastructure in the I/O path; somewhere at the hypervisor and application software operations layer.
If you stick with x86 and virtualization, you may be concerned about the challenges of achieving decent throughput and application performance, which your hypervisor vendor has lately been blaming on legacy storage. That is usually a groundless accusation. The problem is typically located above the storage infrastructure in the I/O path; somewhere at the hypervisor and application software operations layer.
To put it
simply, hypervisor-based computing is the last expression of
sequentially-executing workload optimized for unicore processors introduced by
Intel and others in the late 70s and early 80s. Unicore processors with their
doubling transistor counts every 24 months (Moore's Law) and their doubling
clock speeds every 18 months (House's Hypothesis) created the PC revolution and
defined the architecture of the servers we use today. All applications were
written to execute sequentially, with some interesting time slicing created to
give the appearance of concurrency and multi-threading.
This model is
now reaching end of life. We ran out of clock speed improvements in the early
2000s and unicore chips became multicore chips with no real clock speed
improvements. Basically, we're back to a situation that confronted us way back
in the 70s and 80s, when everyone was working on parallel computing
architectures to gang together many low performance CPUs for faster execution.
A Parallel
Comeback
Those efforts ground to a halt with unicore's success, but now, with innovations from oldsters who remember parallel, they're making a comeback. As soon as Storage Performance Council audits some results, I'll have a story to tell you about parallel I/O and the dramatic improvements in performance and cost that it brings to storage in virtual server environments. It's a real breakthrough, enabled by folks at DataCore who remember what we were working on in tech a couple of decades back.
Those efforts ground to a halt with unicore's success, but now, with innovations from oldsters who remember parallel, they're making a comeback. As soon as Storage Performance Council audits some results, I'll have a story to tell you about parallel I/O and the dramatic improvements in performance and cost that it brings to storage in virtual server environments. It's a real breakthrough, enabled by folks at DataCore who remember what we were working on in tech a couple of decades back.
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