On 08/11/2010 07:50 AM, McKown, John wrote: > http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/11/oracle_on_storage/ > > This is about some comments from Oracle EVP John Fowler. He indicates that > disk is dying. >He envisions it being replace by flash RAM. And not in our current mode of >being an external >I/O device, but actually being on the data bus of the CPU. So all active data >will be in >non-volatile, directly addressable, server memory. Backup will be on high >speed >(1,380 Tb/hour ==~ 383 Mb/second) tape. Not related to this directly was talk >about >a Sparc processor with 128 cores and 16,384 threads. > > John McKown > Systems Engineer IV > IT > > Administrative Services Group > > HealthMarkets(r) > > 9151 Boulevard 26 * N. Richland Hills * TX 76010 > (817) 255-3225 phone * (817)-691-6183 cell > john.mck...@healthmarkets.com * www.HealthMarkets.com
As always, such grandiose predictions will be subject to the realities of cost effectiveness and reliability. As long as DASD technology is able to continue to provide storage capacity, access speeds, and reliability that are adequate for real-world business applications at lower cost than this directly connected RAM envisioned by Oracle, DASD will continue to play a significant role. Experience teaches that non-volatile storage sometimes becomes volatile, and we might even find on the next unusually large solar flare-up that non-magnetic storage may be more sensitive to damage from solar EMP interference. Another issue is that closer integration of massive storage with a specific server introduces new problems in sharing data with other servers or migrating to new servers. Consider how trivially DASD subsystems may be migrated by plugging in a few new fiber channels, shutting down the old, and starting the new; versus having to physically copy the data to internal storage on a new server while both new and old are running, and keeping all data in sync until applications are switched over and the old server is turned off. High speed 1,380 Tb/hour backups are only useful if you can also reliably restore from the backups. -- Joel C. Ewing, Fort Smith, AR jcew...@acm.org ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
