> PFC, I have to say these kind of posts make me a fan of yours. I've
> read many of your storage-related replied and have found them all very
> educational. I just want to let you know I found your assessment of the
> impact of Flash storage perfectly-worded and unbelievably insightful.
> Thanks a million for sharing your knowledge with the list. -Dan
Hehe, thanks.
There was a time when you had to be a big company full of cash to build a
computer, and then sudenly people did it in garages, like Wozniak and
Jobs, out of off-the-shelf parts.
I feel the ioDrive guys are the same kind of hackers, except today's
hackers have much more powerful tools. Perhaps, and I hope it's true,
storage is about to undergo a revolution like the personal computer had
20-30 years ago, when the IBMs of the time were eaten from the roots up.
IMHO the key is that you can build a ioDrive from off the shelf parts,
but you can't do that with a disk drive.
Flash manufacturers are smelling blood, they profit from USB keys and
digicams but imagine the market for solid state drives !
And in this case the hardware is simple : flash, ram, a fpga, some chips,
nothing out of the ordinary, it is the brain juice in the software (which
includes FPGAs) which will sort out the high performance and reliability
winners from the rest.
Lowering the barrier of entry is good for innovation. I believe Linux
will benefit, too, since the target is (for now) high-performance servers,
and as shown by the ioDrive, innovating hackers prefer to write Linux
drivers rather than Vista (argh) drivers.