"Storage is at a tipping point: much of the existing investment in the software stack will be obsolete within two years. This will be the biggest change in storage since the invention of the disk drive by IBM in 1956.
This is not to deprecate the other seismic forces of flash, object storage, cloud and the newer workloads that are driving investment in scale-out architectures and no-SQL databases. But the 50 years of I/O stack development – based on disks and, later, RAID – is essentially obsolete today, as will become obvious to all very soon.
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Storage is the most critical and difficult problem in information technology. In the next decade new storage technologies will enable a radical rethink and simplification of the I/O stack beyond what flash has already done."
"the performance optimization technologies of the last decade – log structured file systems, coalesced writes, out-of-place updates and, soon, byte-addressable NVRAM – are conflicting with similar-but-different techniques used in SSDs and arrays. The software we use is written for dumb storage; we’re getting smart storage; but smart+smart = fragmentation, write amplification, and over-consumption."
