[ Thanks to AV for
this link. ]
“Changes impacting storage are taking place at every
layer of the network architecture: Disk drives are continuing on a
Moore’s law-like cost/capacity curve, yet concurrently we are also
seeing the growth of solid-state technology to overcome the
inherent performance limitations of mechanical disk; virtualization
is changing how architects think about storage, as we now have
operating systems running entirely in user space within a virtual
machine; and applications are choosing HTTP over FC as the
preferred storage protocol.“Given the changes taking place today, emerging file systems are
employing new methods to address scalability, parallelism and new
workload types.“While these changes are impacting storage and it is extremely
important to understand where we are today, storage administrators
also need to look forward to prepare for future changes. Consider
this: Storage capacity is increasing by 40 percent every year, and
while 2-TB disk drives are a commodity today, their performance
characteristics — such as seek time and reliability — have not
improved proportionately. Solid state drives will address this,
revolutionizing storage within a few years; therefore, file systems
will need to support hybrid environments.”