On Sat, Jan 2, 2010 at 5:40 PM, Tim Cook <t...@cook.ms> wrote:
>
>
> On Fri, Jan 1, 2010 at 8:31 PM, Erik Trimble <erik.trim...@sun.com> wrote:
>>
>> Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
>>>
>>> On Fri, 1 Jan 2010, Al Hopper wrote:
>>>
>>>> Interesting article - rumor has it that this is the same controller
>>>> that Seagate will use in its upcoming enterprise level SSDs:
>>>>
>>>> http://anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3702
>>>>
>>>> It reads like SandForce has implemented a bunch of ZFS like
>>>> functionality in firmware. Hmm, I wonder if they used any ZFS source
>>>> code??
>>>
>>> The article (and product) seem interesting, but (in usual form) the
>>> article is written as a sort of unsubstantiated guess-work propped up by
>>> vendor charts and graphs and with links so the gentle reader can purchase
>>> the product on-line.
>>>
>>> It is good to see that Intel is seeing some competition.
>>>
>>> Bob
>>> --
>>
>> Yeah, there were a bunch more "maybe" and "looks like" and "might be" than
>> I'm really comfortable with in that article.
>>
>> The one thing it does bring up is the old problem of Where Intelligence
>> Belongs. You most typically see this in the CPU/coprocessor cycle, where
>> the battle between enough performance gain in using a separate chip vs the
>> main CPU to perform some task is a never ending cycle.
>>
>> One of ZFS's founding ideas is that Intelligence belongs up in the main
>> system (i.e. running in the OS, on the primary CPU(s)), and that all devices
>> are stupid and unreliable. I'm looking at all the (purported) features in
>> this SandForce controller, and wondering how they'll interact with a "smart"
>> filesystem like ZFS, rather than a traditional "stupid" filesystem a la UFS.
>> I see a lot of overlap, which I'm not sure is a good thing.
>>
>> Maybe it's approaching time for vendors to just produce really stupid
>> SSDs: that is, ones that just do wear-leveling, and expose their true
>> page-size info (e.g. for MLC, how many blocks of X size have to be written
>> at once) and that's about it. Let filesystem makers worry about scheduling
>> writes appropriately, doing redundancy, etc.
>>
>> Oooh! Oooh! a whole cluster of USB thumb drives! Yeah! <wink>
>>
>
> While I'm sure to offend someone, it must be stated. That's not going to
> happen for the simple fact that there's all of two vendors that could
> utilize it, both niche (in relative terms). NetApp and Sun. Why would SSD
> MFG's waste their time building drives to sell for less money than their
> mainline that a very, very small portion of the market can actually utilize?
>
> Until you convince Hitachi, EMC, HP, IBM, and Microsoft to develop similar
> "intelligent" filesystems, the SSD's you're recommending won't see the light
> of day (unless Sun/NetApp decide to make it themselves).
>
Agreed. One issue is that there is a limited pool of highly talented
and motivated developers like those that work on Team ZFS. The 2nd
issue is how to pay for that development work. Obviously SSD software
IP (intellectual property) providers can recoup their NRE costs
because they can amortize them over large volume commodity hardware
devices. It appears (to me) that SandForce has thought about their
business model and is targeting both the high-end, high margin, lower
volume enterprise SSD market while also targeting the low-end (desktop
systems) commodity SSD market with a "stripped down" version of the
same software.
Regards,
--
Al Hopper Logical Approach Inc,Plano,TX a...@logical-approach.com
Voice: 972.379.2133 Timezone: US CDT
OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) Member - Apr 2005 to Mar 2007
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/ogb/ogb_2005-2007/
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