Skype Journal: Spindrift
March 31, 2006 10:56 PMThe significance of new giant solid-state hard drives is probably higher than many readers imagine.
I used to work at Oracle from ‘97 to ‘01 as a server technology specialist, mostly poking around high availability and very big transaction systems. Databases like Oracle perform two main functions:
- They manage concurrent access to data from contending users.
- They ration out I/O, and abstract that process away from users.
The rest is just features, as they say.
The end of the spinning hard drive will be disruptive, as it undermines ones of the two central pillars of our information storage tools. I wouldn’t rush out and short Oracle stock right away, though — they’ve diversified into apps and this is a slow process unfolding over a decade or more.
But it will cause seismic change — an equivalent of the invention of optical networking, say. Whilst CPU, transmission and storage have become cheap, I/O itself has been relaively expensive. Many disk arrays attached to Oracle databases are mostly empty. They’re being bought for multiple spindles, not storage area. Order-of-magnitude shifts in the relative costs cause structural industry changes.
The telecom angle is that faster I/O means we’ve got an even greater ability to soak up connectivity. Your kids will laugh that you called a 1 megabit connection “broadband”, and even had to pay for such meagre resources. Roll out that fibre, folks! You’re gonna need it.
Spin some Geddes at Telepocalypse.
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