Turing Award Winner On The Future of Storage

weileong writes "Ars Technica highlights an interview at ACM Queue with Jim Gray, a winner of the ACM Turing award *(among other things) by one of the pioneers of RAID (among other things). Many issues touched upon, including: "programmers have to start thinking of the disk as a sequential device rather than a random access device." "So disks are not random access any more?" "That's one of the things that more or less everybody is gravitating toward. The idea of a log-structured file system is much more attractive. There are many other architectural changes that we'll have to consider in disks with huge capacity and limited bandwidth." Actual interview has MUCH detail, definitely worth reading."

Comments

Huge disks

[heironymouscoward]

If I look at the trends of the last decades, while disk sizes increase exponentially, the actual number of top-level objects I store on my systems increases only linearly, and quite slowly. True, I still store individual documents, but I also store AVIs, ISOs, entire photo albums that take gigabytes each.

It's still random access: I can choose and access an object, even individual photos, without scanning through large amounts of unwanted data.