4 ms·

Radical simplification and IMO this is great. Remains to be seen how this will fare in comparison with RAID. I'd wager that google would be very interested, if

Radical simplification and IMO this is great. Remains to be seen how this will fare in comparison with RAID. I'd wager that google would be very interested, if they already not doing something like that in their data centers. Nerdy me likes idea of POE hub and bunch of drives doing their own thing. Also pretty good time to start writing stuff to support this into Linux kernel and developing support apps. my 2c

dmpk2k 13y ago
I'd wager that google would be very interested, if they already not doing something like that in their data centers. I wonder about that. It's usually a lot cheaper to move computation to data, rather than data to computation. The model that Seagate is presenting here strikes me as wrong, because it assumes very fat pipes (or specialized topologies) for any non-trivial app. At the scale Google operates at, I just don't see this happening. That, and I have a healthy distrust of networks. Instead of having a box with an OSS OS and dumb drives with small(er) closed firmware blobs, now you have the OS, all the network devices and their closed firmware blobs, and drives with large(r) closed firmware blobs, just to access your data. A lot more can go wrong. A lot more byzantine things can go wrong. Drives are dodgy lying sacks of fecal matter as is; this looks like it'll make things much worse. The model Seagate presents could be useful for data that is rarely accessed, but I'm not really sold on that either.
- vidarh 13y ago
  This model is simply Seagate trying to do via IP what FibreChannel has allowed with expensive hardware most of us don't have. Yes, it means your switch must not fail. But if you worry about your switch failing, you have that worry if it's not handling storage too, and you deal with it with redundancy. Moving the storage to hang off a switch does not change that - if you have a single switch and it fails, your servers are just as unavailable either way. But hanging storage off your switches means it is possible to have servers take over drives of failing servers, which makes many other failure scenarios easier to handle. In terms of pipes, yes, that is a concern for some uses. It won't be fast unless you go to 10GE, and 10GE switches are still hopelessly overpriced. But "most people" do not serve up gigabits of content, and could do just fine with slower drives hanging off cheap 1Gbps switches. I already assume not only that my drives will fail, but that the network and servers will fail too. Which means I need to replicate data over many servers on different networks. In that case having the drives be directly addressable over TCP/IP is not an added complexity, and it opens up so many opportunities in improving flexibility of server enclosures etc.
  - dmpk2k 13y ago
    your servers are just as unavailable either way Right, but having local disks reduces the sources of failure, reduces contention, reduces latency, reduces the complexity of failures, and is thus much nicer to work with. Computers and networks would be easier for us to debug if they had a binary works well/doesn't work at all, but we all know they don't. Especially networks. The simplest and sanest architecture is keeping dumb disks local to where computation is running (and yes, that may also include duplicating data across several servers). Anything else is asking for more crazy classes of failure. Been there, bled there, not going back there.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

dmpk2k 13y ago

I'd wager that google would be very interested, if they already not doing something like that in their data centers. I wonder about that. It's usually a lot cheaper to move computation to data, rather than data to computation. The model that Seagate is presenting here strikes me as wrong, because it assumes very fat pipes (or specialized topologies) for any non-trivial app. At the scale Google operates at, I just don't see this happening. That, and I have a healthy distrust of networks. Instead of having a box with an OSS OS and dumb drives with small(er) closed firmware blobs, now you have the OS, all the network devices and their closed firmware blobs, and drives with large(r) closed firmware blobs, just to access your data. A lot more can go wrong. A lot more byzantine things can go wrong. Drives are dodgy lying sacks of fecal matter as is; this looks like it'll make things much worse. The model Seagate presents could be useful for data that is rarely accessed, but I'm not really sold on that either.

vidarh 13y ago
This model is simply Seagate trying to do via IP what FibreChannel has allowed with expensive hardware most of us don't have. Yes, it means your switch must not fail. But if you worry about your switch failing, you have that worry if it's not handling storage too, and you deal with it with redundancy. Moving the storage to hang off a switch does not change that - if you have a single switch and it fails, your servers are just as unavailable either way. But hanging storage off your switches means it is possible to have servers take over drives of failing servers, which makes many other failure scenarios easier to handle. In terms of pipes, yes, that is a concern for some uses. It won't be fast unless you go to 10GE, and 10GE switches are still hopelessly overpriced. But "most people" do not serve up gigabits of content, and could do just fine with slower drives hanging off cheap 1Gbps switches. I already assume not only that my drives will fail, but that the network and servers will fail too. Which means I need to replicate data over many servers on different networks. In that case having the drives be directly addressable over TCP/IP is not an added complexity, and it opens up so many opportunities in improving flexibility of server enclosures etc.
- dmpk2k 13y ago
  your servers are just as unavailable either way Right, but having local disks reduces the sources of failure, reduces contention, reduces latency, reduces the complexity of failures, and is thus much nicer to work with. Computers and networks would be easier for us to debug if they had a binary works well/doesn't work at all, but we all know they don't. Especially networks. The simplest and sanest architecture is keeping dumb disks local to where computation is running (and yes, that may also include duplicating data across several servers). Anything else is asking for more crazy classes of failure. Been there, bled there, not going back there.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]