The present & the future of Storage
Two interesting articles about the history, the present & the future of storage. Useful to get the big picture of the storage market without being lost in the details.
Titled “Commentary about IP Storage Directions”, this post from Richard Mc Dougall is a very well thought Sun-oriented point of view of where the storage world is heading to. It includes some historical notes about SAN & NAS, describes the newer iSCSI protocol and how it could be used as a temporary solution in the possible migration from SAN to NAS. Using NFSv4, the one you find already ready in Solaris 10.
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The second article is a technical essay that starts by describing memory caches to end up describing the complete hierarchy of backing store, starting from CPU registers to tapes. Includes some details on tools (cpustat, cputrack) that can be used on Linux & Solaris to get statistics about how well the caches are used.
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