Almost every measure of computer performance increases exponentially. Here is one important exception: disk drives keep getting bigger, but they are not getting much faster. As a result, the number of seeks-per-second available for each gigabyte of data (seeks/second/GB) is plummeting.
Let me give a concrete example. Fifteen years ago, a typical one-gigabyte disk drive had a seek time of ten-milliseconds or so. Do that math, and that’s 100 seeks-per-second for that one gigabyte. Today, one-terabyte drives have maybe five-millisecond seek time. Do the math, and that’s 200 seeks-per-second for the whole terabyte, or just 0.2 seeks/second per gigabyte. Over the past fifteen years, your ability to access the data you own has gone down by a factor of 500.
That’s bad enough, but if you consider how many CPU instructions you can execute while you wait for the disk drive, things are even worse. Fifteen years ago, the Intel 486DX could do 54 MIPS (million instructions per second). Today Intel’s QX9770 can do 59,455 MIPS. For every millisecond you wait, today’s chips execute 1000 times more instructions.
Consider these facts together: From a human perspective, seeks/second/GB has gone down by a factor of a five-hundred, but from the CPU’s perspective, it is five-hundred-thousand times slower! Remember those old mainframe computers with tape drives on the front, jerking back and forth? To the CPU, tape drives back then seemed faster than disk drives today.
Disks are the new tape—worse than tape used to be—so we obviously need to find a new disk. That’s where flash comes in: ten times more expensive than disk, but for random access, a hundred times faster. For now, flash is mostly used in small portable devices, or for very high performance, but if you look forward five or ten years, I predict that people will think of flash the way they think of disks today—as the fast-access storage for everyday use. And they’ll think of disks as being more like tape—a slow-access media that’s useful for stuff you might want to look at someday, but not particularly useful for data you use all the time.
Flash is too expensive to replace disk right away, so first we’ll see a new generation of storage systems that combine the two: flash for performance and disk for capacity. I hesitate to compare this with the old HSM (hierarchical storage management) solutions that combined disk with tape, because those were so sucky—things that would take seconds on disk could sometimes take hours. They only worked for a limited subset of applications, and only with intricate and painful management. Fortunately, the performance ratio between flash and disk is much better than for disk and tape, so we will be able to automate the management and still get good performance. HSM without the M, if you will.
(This article is mostly about the industry in general. For more on what NetApp is doing, check here and here.)
