ITNews

The InfoStor posting Disk drive market/technology/trends update is reporting

Improvements continue in form factors, rotation speeds, interfaces, recording technology, energy consumption, and encryption.

In an industry known for its cyclical up/downturns, the hard disk drive (HDD) market appears to be relatively stable. The TrendFocus market research firm expects HDD shipments to surge from 495 million in 2007 to 768 million in 2011, a compound annual growth rate of 11.61%. However, in a testament to the ongoing decrease in cost-per-gigabyte, HDD revenues are expected to grow from $31.3 billion in 2007 to $33.3 billion in 2011, a CAGR of only 1.56% (see figure, below).

(Credit: InfoStor)

It looks like the long-running SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) interface may be nearing retirement. I don’t think there are MediCare benefits for retiring technologies.

(Credit: InfoStor)

The article goes on to discuss perpendicular recording, drive “greening,” and on-board encryption.

Western Digital new and improved drives illustrate industry trends.

One of the major themes among disk drive manufacturers over the last year has been reduced energy consumption. Nowhere is that more evident than at Western Digital (WD), which has introduced GreenPower versions of its WD AV drives, dubbed AV-GP. Available in capacities of 500GB, 750GB, and 1TB, the SATA drives reduce power consumption by up to 40% compared to standard drives, according to WD. Technologies that contribute to lower power, cooling, and noise include the following:

* IntelliPower: Balances spin speed, transfer rate, and caching algorithms to reduce power requirements and boost performance.

* IntelliSeek: Calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise, and vibration.

* IntelliPark: Lowers power consumption by automatically unloading recording heads during idle mode to reduce aerodynamic drag and disabling read/write channel electronics.

The HDD industry is exemplary of an industry selling more for less. Keep it up!

…John

Welcome to acronym city. Translated it means multilevel-cell (MLC) technology and “not and” (NAND) gate technology, are increasing the density of solid-state drives (SSD).

(From: EE Times)

Hopefully MLC will help lower the the cost per GB ratio of SSD compared to hard disk drives (HDD) ($17.00 / $0.40 =~ 42). Interestingly, todays SSD cost per GB is much less than the 1988 price of $58,000 per GB for HDD, if GB HDDs even existed back then. (See Expensive Tech Memories).

The EE Times posting MLC advances NAND storage explains who some of the players are and their products.

Compared with traditional hard disk drives, SSDs feature lower power consumption, faster boot times, increased reliability, improved performance and no mechanical noise. However, low densities and high pricing have kept solid-state technology from moving forward. Some vendors, however, are preparing to change that.

Micron Technology, Toshiba America Electronic Components (TAEC) and Lexar Media recently entered the SSD market with lines offering a range of form factors and capacities. Competitors Intel and Samsung Electronics rolled out products claimed, respectively, to be the smallest and fastest in their class.

…John

The Reg Developer posting Time to rewrite DBMS, says Ingres founder begins

Abandon SQL

Database management systems (DBMS) are 20 years out of date and should be completely rewritten to reflect modern use of computers.

That’s according to a group of academics including DBMS pioneer Mike Stonebraker, Ingres founder and a Postgres architect taking his second controversial outing so far this year…

In a paper entitled The end of an architectural era (It’s time for a complete rewrite), the group - drawn from DBMS specialists at MIT and in industry - have said that modern use of computers renders many features of mainstream DBMS obsolete.

If you are interested in database evolution, read the Abstract. If it perks your interest, get yourself a copy of the paper.

ABSTRACT

In previous papers, some of us predicted the end of “one size fits all” as a commercial relational DBMS paradigm. These papers presented reasons and experimental evidence that showed that the major RDBMS vendors can be outperformed by 1-2 orders of magnitude by specialized engines in the data warehouse, stream processing, text, and scientific database markets.

Assuming that specialized engines dominate these markets over time, the current relational DBMS code lines will be left with the business data processing (OLTP) market and hybrid markets where more than one kind of capability is required. In this paper we show that current RDBMSs can be beaten by nearly two orders of magnitude in the OLTP market as well. The experimental evidence comes from comparing a new OLTP prototype, H-Store, which we have built at M.I.T. to a popular RDBMS on the standard transactional benchmark, TPC-C.

We conclude that the current RDBMS code lines, while attempting to be a “one size fits all” solution, in fact, excel at nothing. Hence, they are 25 year old legacy code lines that should be retired in favor of a collection of “from scratch” specialized engines. The DBMS vendors (and the research community) should start with a clean sheet of paper and design systems for tomorrow’s requirements, not continue to push code lines and architectures designed for yesterday’s needs.

The first two paragraphs of the Introduction eloquently sums up the history of relation DBMSs.

INTRODUCTION

The popular relational DBMSs all trace their roots to System R from the 1970s. For example, DB2 is a direct descendent of System R, having used the RDS portion of System R intact in their first release. Similarly, SQL Server is a direct descendent of Sybase System 5, which, borrowed heavily from System R. Lastly, the first release of Oracle implemented the user interface from System R.

All three systems were architected more than 25 years ago, when hardware characteristics were much different than today. Processors are thousands of times faster and memories are thousands of times larger. Disk volumes have increased enormously, making it possible to keep essentially everything, if
one chooses to. However, the bandwidth between disk and main memory has increased much more slowly. One would expect this relentless pace of technology to have changed the architecture of database systems dramatically over the last quarter of a century, but surprisingly the architecture of most DBMSs is essentially identical to that of System R.

I recall the “database wars” of the mid 1970’s. The established Codasyl camp and the relational model new kids on the block, slugged it out. The relational model sort of won. The Codasyl didn’t really lose, it is still very much alive today on mainframes (Data Stays Mainly on the Mainframe).

I’m looking forward to the next “database wars.” Who knows, maybe something new and improved will emerge.

…John

In an earlier posting, Amazon Cloud, I mentioned I’m using Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) to backup some stuff.

I was a bit taken back when I read the Cnet News.com posting Amazon storage ‘cloud’ service goes dark, ruffles Web 2.0 feathers.

Amazon.com Web Service’s hosted storage service went down Friday morning, frustrating many Web site customers and refreshing concerns with the ballyhooed approach of cloud computing.

An online forum spiked with customer complaints Friday morning as some people found that content stored on Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) was unavailable or performed slowly.

This isn’t the first time Amazon has run into problems keeping its computing services running without fail.

This going dark episode just reinforces my view that one can’t trust technology.

…John

Amazon is selling more than books and stuff. It’s selling storage, computing power and other behind-the-scenes data center services. The New York Times posting Amazon’s Hot New Item: Its Data Center gives an overview.

EC2 lets its customers quickly start up a virtual computer in the ”cloud” — industry slang for data centers around the world — then use it as a Web server or for crunching data and shut it down just as fast.

Amazon, which gives away the computer code to access its services, bases its fees on how much data is shifted around and stored. For example, the company charges 15 cents per month for every gigabyte of data stored in its Simple Storage Service. Developers pay another 10 cents each time they send a gigabyte into the cloud and 18 cents per terabyte when they pull data back out.

I’m using Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) via JungleDisk to backup some stuff. The price is right compared to other online storage services.

(From: JungleDisk)

…John