SteveJ-restore-test

I won't be buying shares in any Fibre Channel-based tech stocks as I think the technology will be dead within 5 years for two reasons: Enterprise Storage Arrays will stop being used for high-intensity random I/O, instead being used for "seek and stream", and PCI Flash or SCM Storage will become the low-latency "Tier 0" Storage of choice because of speed (latency), cost and simplicity. Update 1-Feb-2012: Another article by Fusion-io, Getting the most out of flash storage   provides extra links: Flash storage moves closer to CPUs : STEC is moving into PCI Flash cards. EMC: Flash could spell doom for Fibre Channel but don't talk about PCI Flash challenges. Flash storage in post-PC devices advances , general background on Flash memory. Elsewhere I've written Jim Gray's observation, "Disk is the new Tape" should be "Disk is the new CD". That is, Enterprise Storage is best suited for "Seek and Stream", not random I/O. Enterp...

Is Fusion-io's demonstration of "1 Billion IO operations per second" the same sort of game-changer that the 1987/8 RAID paper by Patterson, Katz and Gibson was? Within 5 years all "Single Large Expensive Disks" (SLED's) were out of production, will we see Flash disks in Storage Arrays and low-latency SAN's out-of-production by 2017? A more interesting "real world" demo by Fusion-io in early 2012 was loading MS-SQL in 16 virtual machines running Windows 2008 under VMware . They achieved a 2.8-fold improvement in throughput with a possible (unstated) 5-10 fold access-time improvement. Updated 16:00, 31-Jan-2012 . A little more interpretation of the demo descriptions and detailed PCI bus analysis. Fusion used a total of 64 cards in 8 servers running against a "custom load generator", or 16 million IO/sec per card. There are two immediate problems: How did they get the IO results off the servers? Presumably ethernet and TCP IP. [ No, in...