[ Thanks to Paul
Shread for this link. ]
“Data storage has become the weak link in enterprise
applications, and without a concerted effort on the part of storage
vendors, the technology is in danger of becoming irrelevant. The
I/O stack just isn’t keeping pace with advances in silicon, and it
could find itself replaced by new technologies like phase change
memory (PCM) that promise unfettered access to data.“The problem is simple: Memory bandwidth and CPU performance
continue to grow much faster than disk and bus performance and disk
channel speed, and combined with a limited I/O interface (POSIX),
the result is in an I/O bottleneck that only gets worse with
time.“A look at the performance increases for various elements of the
storage stack over the last five years paints a clear picture:“* Memory bandwidth: Intel has gone from 4.3 GB/sec in 2004 to
40 GB/sec, while AMD has gone from 5.3 to 25.6, an increase of 9.3
times for Intel and 4.8 times for AMD.* CPU performance: Using Moore’s Law that transistor count
doubles every 18 months, I will assume that this translates to
performance (which it does not) for a greater than tenfold
performance improvement.”