The two main reasons for fueling new research in storage technology architectures are:
Processors and memory technologies have been advancing in a much faster pace than storage technology, and
High processing power computers systems are being built with various techniques/approaches including networking stand-alone servers, PCs or workstations in a cluster environment.
The above two reasons led to the improvement of existing, and sometimes introduction of new, storage technologies, including interfaces with large bandwidth and connectivity capabilities such as (i) Serial Storage Architecture & Fibre Channel; (ii) new higher speed drives such as the 10 & 12KRPM with capacities approaching 36Gbytes; and (iii) more complex RAID adapters with high MIPS embedded processors & large amount of caching. Such improvements are designed to reduce the impact of I/O subsystem on the overall system performance. Further new interfaces, such as I2O, have been proposed to ease the development process of I/O subsystem, and specially storage adapters, by providing one standard interface to various operating systems and I/O adapters. Storage adapters are designed with internal embedded processors to reduce the overhead on the host processor by moving the bulk of the work to the storage adapters - a technique used in mainframes in the 60's, and now implemented in small-scale servers. Many other approaches have been proposed to alleviate the impact of storage on system performance including larger logical drives, overlapping requests to drives, using selected drive region, etc.
The Storage Technology Technical Area will cover issues related to
Still Under Construction.