Wozniak Accepts Post At a Storage Systems Start-Up

Hugh Pickens writes "Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is going back to work as chief scientist at Fusion-io, a start-up company that tweaks computers to let them tap vast amounts of storage at very quick rates. In the early days of Apple, Wozniak stood out as one of Silicon Valley's most creative engineers, demonstrating a knack for elegant computer designs that made efficient use of components and combined many features into a cohesive package and Wozniak will do similar work at Fusion-io, although this time with larger server computers and storage systems rather than PCs. 'I have a pretty quiet life, and I like to watch technology evolve,' says Wozniak. 'In this case, I like the people and the product, and said I would like some greater involvement.'"

Comments

SSD == Turning Point

[dsginter]

I've had the chance to play with some pretty phenomenal solid state drives (SSD) lately and, I have to say, that I can't believe that there isn't more industry buzz.

In a few months, an extra $100 will probably buy 120GB SSD, which will make a given PC perform like something completely different (you really need to go test drive an SSD PC if you have not yet indulged).

In a decade, I can see handhelds having so much storage and so much processing power, that we'll all just carry around our PC-on-a-phone and just use a standard interface to put that PC on any external monitor and keyboard. Hell, I can USB boot Ubuntu from my Blackberry, already.

Re:SSD == Turning Point

[ouachiski]

In a decade, I can see handhelds having so much storage and so much processing power, that we'll all just carry around our PC-on-a-phone and just use a standard interface to put that PC on any external monitor and keyboard.

Ok I have heard this a million times now and I just dont see it happening. Cell phones are easily lost, broken, dropped in toilets or stolen. Could you imagine what you would feel if you dropped your pc in the toilet. I can see integrating more tasks into it, but you will still have a need for a base station.

Re:SSD == Turning Point

[xlotlu]

I want to say that in 5 years the mechanical, magnetic hard drive will be dead, but something tells me that the density will give it an edge for quite a while longer than that unless some major breakthrough occurs in the manufacture of SSD.

Actually in 5 years' time they might be back with a vengeance. See this guy's thesis about Laser-Induced Femtosecond Magnetic Recording

He proved in 2007 that it's possible to use an ultrafast pulsing lasers for demagnetization and magnetization reversal, unleashing a potential recording rate of magnetic media higher than 100 Tbits/second.

Of course, packing femtosecond lasers inside HDDs is nowhere near feasible in the foreseeable future, and neither could the plasmon antennae keep up with the high density (plasmon antennae were expected to be used for polarizing light below its wavelength)

However, according to TFOT, during his Seagate internship Stanciu proved the technology is viable, mostly because of recent developments in plasmon antennae. He also chose to use picosecond lasers instead, which are substantially cheaper and smaller, but slower, at "only" 1 Tbits/s.

IIRC laser-reading from magnetic media was already possible a few years ago, at huge speeds as well. That makes the potential of magnetic storage already hundreds of times faster than the expected maximum throughput of NAND-based SSDs.

My Hero!

[the_B0fh]

Woz was always my hero. I was just a pimply faced kid when I first discovered Apple IIs (or more correctly, Apple II compatibles, since I was from a 3rd world country). Then I started reading about what he did, and his designs and so on. And when AAPL went public, he gave away his own shares to people who helped Apple get off the ground. Very very nice, very down to earth guy, from what I read about him. IIRC, he wanted to sell the Apple Is for $200 or so, and Jobs wanted $2000, and they settled on $666.66.

I was so disappointed when he left Apple and quit working on the Apple II series - that was such a great computer, and ahead of its times.

Re:Good - Stay Busy

[Anthony_Cargile]

Well, he does until the company gets too big then he'll leave out of dissatisfaction. He has stated this, and you almost can't blame him: little usually= friendly, personal, tight; big usually= formal, !personal, and sometimes even evil.

Regardless, he is a very skilled hardware hacker. I especially appreciate still to this day the ADB, which was designed (according to legend) in a mere weekend, on the same level of hack-skill as the "Joy wrote vi in a weekend" hacker lore. I just hope he never loses his ability for great pranks, too - that's another personal hero element he has for me.

Keep it up woz, never change.

Woz == "down to earth"

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a very brief close encounter with him, in which I got to ride his Segway. He was, indeed, eminently approachable, with absolutely no "mightier than thou" attitude, self-assured, willing to engage, and very affirming to talk to.

(And that was *before* I recognized him!)

ZFS and SSDs

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had the chance to play with some pretty phenomenal solid state drives (SSD) lately and, I have to say, that I can't believe that there isn't more industry buzz.

Depends on who you ask. The Sun ZFS guys are all over this and are screaming at the top of their lungs about the use of SSDs for both read and write performance:

http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/l2arc_screenshots
http://blogs.sun.com/ahl/entry/hybrid_storage_pools_in_cacm
http://blogs.sun.com/main/tags/fishworks

Sun many have other problems, but engineering talent is not one of them.

It'll be interesting to see what he comes up with.

[jd]

Storage systems are not trivial pieces of hardware and the range of approaches for handling the problem is staggering.

In the red corner, you've your basic NAS and SAN solutions. In the blue corner, you've direct-disk-to-memory systems using RDMA and Infiniband. In the green corner, you've WAN solutions (SCSI-over-IP, RAID-over-IP).

In the purple corner, you've smarter drives (virtual sectors, filesystems in hardware). In the cyan corner, you've more powerful hardware (many read heads per platter, uber-large RAM caches).

(Knowing Wozniak's reputation for doing things different, he's probably inventing a rhododendron corner.)

There is no shortage of opportunity. However, as with the early home computer market, there is a shortage of consensus on what a storage system actually does, other than "store stuff". That seems to be a world Wozniak does well in - the lack of standards meant the Apple II did well, the presence of standards meant that NeXT didn't. In the current computing world, where standards are everything (especially if they come with pretty holographic stickers), can he do much with the flexibility in the arena?

Re:if I had a penny for every failed distributed F

[Anthony_Cargile]

Want another penny? Here you go:

A cloud-distributed filesystem using each processor's bottom 2 or 3 general-purpose registers as a block for said filesystem, writing the contents only during certain times, or during periods of low access. This allows for lightning fast storage retrieval perfect for a database or large amounts of quickly updating information that needs to be retrieved just as fast, even better if archiving is not preferred after a brief period (think ticker tape), despite the possible redundancy of a RAID backup using said timing mentioned above. limiting factors are the speed of the reader(s), network speed, and bus bandwidth. Registers not used for storage are used for typical processing, aided by the amount of processors involved in cloud computing (think blue-gene).

There ya go, maybe I should make my own startup now?

Because of his deep background in storage?

[joeflies]

Not to dismiss what he's done, but for being the chief scientist in a storage startup, it seems like he is a bit underqualified compared to what the cutting edge of storage looks like nowadays.

It seems that it may be more likely they brought him in in order to impress investors, i.e. an investor is more likely to put money into something where they have a big name of an entrepeneur that's struck it big. And it doesn't get much bigger than Wozniak.

It has been done before

[symbolset]

There's nothing new under the sun. We used to do it with system RAM dedicated to the purpose, back in the '80s.

Back in the stone age, we used to do it with RAM in a drive box. And then with add-in cards that acted like disk but stored RAM. I bet you noticed that RAM costs a lot of money if you need 320 GB of it. For a brief moment so long ago that I forget the date, we did it with something called "bubble memory".

I also talked about this here two or three years ago, before this product was produced, so I look forward to providing some prior art to the inevitable patent troll discussion.

But that's not the point. This is a startup, and they're at a vulnerable cusp in their history. If you need this product I suggest you buy it before somebody discovers the motive and method to kill it. I can think of three motives and two methods offhand, so if I were you I'd get crackin'.

Re:There is another major drawback

[symbolset]

I have to admit that I was concerned about this too as I discussed this issue with an engineer five years ago. However, even the palimpsest of Archimedes survives to this day. With digital technologies we can do better. It turns out that by providing wear levelling and planning for the predictable degradation of your media, you can design a controller that provides reliable access to written data transparently to the user, despite the fallibility of the media. With sufficient parallel redundancy you can do so without even alerting the user to your difficulty, and in the extreme case you can degrade gracefully. When the devices are solid state, you can build predictable reliable performance for a specific time/use. That's what these devices do. Your concern is unwarranted. We figured that out.

Re:No, we DID NOT figure it out.

[symbolset]

I could, indeed, write a piece of code that would wear out parts of your SSD within days.

Could you? Would you fill the disk almost completely full, and then write and delete the last block over and over with random data 100,000 times per second?

Gee, if they had though of that they might have done something really clever like include a RAM cache and a thousand extra blocks you can't see, and happily report the block written and deleted when it really wasn't, or actually write it to a different physical block each time. They might have had a stroke of genius and included logic to move least-written data to the heavily used blocks and let you bang on fresh ones now and then. It would take a real men of genius engineer to predict this pathological case and include a special purpose computer onboard to deal with it. At least it would if the engineers didn't read slashdot where we've discussed these problems to death for years and years.

They would have done it transparently in the device logic without even telling you because the device is solid state and every bit is as close as every other bit so latency is not a problem. But no, if they were that clever they would have also included some spare bytes in every block and a map so that if a bit in the middle went bad it wouldn't knock out the whole block and some sort of error detection and correction mechanism. It a fit of brilliance they might even have planned for a heavily worn block with too many burned out bits to borrow unused spare bits from another block. Gee, if they were practically omniscient they might have included programmable firmware in case they needed to push out a cure for pathological case they hadn't considered yet.

That is, if they were clever (pdf) that way (pdf).

And if you're trying that hard to break it, a spinning disk won't hold up long at all either.

Re:Good - Stay Busy

[paganizer]

And if it hadn't been for Woz, steve jobs would probably be a used car salesman somewhere. One guy made, essentially singlehandedly, a great product, then by example started the creative environment that led to apple putting out great products.
Steve jobs is good at marketing, but without a first few good products there is no telling where he would have ended up.