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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.'"
It's always good to stay busy, and doubly so if you can actually do something that helps grow the existing technology.
And if he can make some cash from this gig, even better!
Go Woz!
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.
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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.
Good for Steve! The world needs more minds like his in the game.
The article is from the NY Times.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
For the sake of easy readability, I'd like to give the grammar nazis somewhere to file all of their remarks.
do not read this line twice.
tweaks computers to let them tap vast amounts of storage at very quick rates
In other words, Yet Another Half-Baked Clustered/Distributed Filesystem we can add to the list of dozens of failed distributed/clustered filesystems.
Please help metamoderate.
It's a solid state hard drive that uses PCI Express instead of SATA. It looks pretty zippy. Decently large, too. Is there something else cool about their technology that I'm missing?
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!)
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.
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?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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?
The "specialized BIOS" would be a ROM on the card itself - you can boot off of a PCIe SATA or SAS controller, just like you can boot off of a PCI PATA or SATA controller, just like you could boot off of an ISA ST506 or PATA controller.
If by "specialized BIOS", you mean "storage controller firmware on the card", then yes.
This is hardly different from any SCSI or SATA controller on the market, only this one has the "disk" built-in. When the system is POSTing, it triggers every device's initialization routine, which is where a disk controller can let the BIOS know it has (bootable) disks up for grabs.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Let me translate this for you...
These are "LAN Solutions"
"SCSI-over-IP" - iSCSI
"RAID-over-IP" - some volume manager sitting on top of iSCSI
"WAN Solutions":
WAFS (Wide Area File Services) from the likes of Cisco or Riverbed. They optimize CIFS/NFS protocols which are horrible over high latency links.
Infiniband... Dying... besides infiniband used SCSI over IB to a IB to FibreChannel gateway.
Don't forget tape and our friend FICON.
Where can he be flexible? In the past few years we've seen the adoption of:
-Virtual Tape Libraries (tho they've been in the mainframe world for ages)
-Deduplication in Hardware
-Encryption of Data at Rest (in the tape drive; and now in the disk drive)
We've got plenty of CPU power with multi core systems... what about using that for Compression? (Sorry StorageTek did that in the 80s on their Iceberg (aka IBM's RVA Subsystem).
I don't need more capacity, I need to be able to manage it easier.
In other words, Yet Another Half-Baked Clustered/Distributed Filesystem we can add to the list of dozens of failed distributed/clustered filesystems.
Um... not even close?
This isn't a clustered/distributed anything. It's also not "virtual".
It's a very real, very fast, local storage for very real computers - servers mostly, but if you've got a few grand to blow on an extreme gaming rig, why not go the extra bit to make your levels load faster?
Their quoted numbers are per PCIe X4 device >100,000 IOPS and >640MB/s both reading and writing, and they have independent benchmarks back that up. They're not kidding. The game has changed. This changes everything about how traditional workloads are configured, when you use a SAN vs local disk, how much throughput your apps can get, how many VMs you can run in a server... basically everything in the server world except where you store the data. You still want to store the data in the SAN for redundancy reasons.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
You must be new here.
No, I be new here!
I got some bad grammar
...yeah, it's the buzzword. It's the current growth area.
Let's consider what The Woz did for floppies Back In The Day. While the early floppy drives are to modern drives the way the Wright Brothers plane is comparable to the B2 Stealth Bomber.... the fact is, The Woz turned the industry on its head. While in one light his contributions can be viewed as an incremental improvement, in every other light, HOLY CRAP HE KICKED SO MUCH ASS when it came to primordial microcomputer disk controllers. He proved that the highest-tech, super-chip-count hyper-expensive controllers could be implemented with a handful of chips.
And he could - COULD! - do it again.
I'm totally behind some company - ANY company - throwing money at The Woz, betting on the off chance he gets another flash of insight and pushes storage technology 20 years further ahead in as many minutes.
Was Woz the Right Genius at the Right Time, or is he a straight-up Hacker's Hacker, who just needs the right operational conditions for his genius to manifest?
Time will tell.
We have these in our production servers right now. They really deliver. They seem to top out at around 60,000 IOPS with EXT3 (the 100K figure was with XFS) but I've hit close to 800MB/s on sequential transfers.
It would have an Option ROM, like RAID cards and every other bootable controller does
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Option_ROM
Not using a SATA interface should yield a good performance advantage.
Rock on, Woz
You could have an option Rom, or you could just emulate AHCI (or even ATA) in hardware up to the point the OS loads a native driver, and switch to native mode after that.
Actually I sort of wonder if you couldn't implement an AHCI contoller which talks to flash directly. The bottleneck in SATA is the drive and the SATA bus, not the PCI Express AHCI controller. PCI-E x16 can manage 4,000 MB/s compared to SATA2's 300 MB/s. SATA2 has plenty of bandwidth for a hard disk, but it looks like it will become a bottleneck with an SSD with lots of flash chips running in parallel. In fact an 2.5 inch Intel extreme SSD manages 250MB/sec now, pretty close to the SATA limit. A PCI Express card covered in NAND flash aimed at enterprise servers could easily be more parallel than this.
AHCI is quite flexible (it has efficient NCQ for example) and is already supported by all current OSs and Bioses. There's no reason why you couldn't design a wide flash array on a PCI express card that looks like a fast drive behind an AHCI controller to software.
The upside to this is that there is no device driver and option Rom to develop/support.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
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?
I always thought that the Apple ][ did well because it was cheap and versatile, and that NeXT failed because their machines were outlandishly expensive and proprietary.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
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'.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
TRANSMETA
Catalin Braescu
Ofaly.com
Not this crap again.
The 100k writes is per block.
If a block fails, it just doesn't get used again, and the chip continues working.
Similarly, it's easy to say that once you've hit 100k blocks, you don't write to that block ever again.
There's a metric fucking shit-ton of blocks in today's SSDs, and they will last longer than the warranty on your slow, noisy, power hungry mechanical harddrive.
What's that? You use harddrives that are out of warranty?
LOL.
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.
Help stamp out iliturcy.