Single Level Store is not bizarre, it's brilliant.
Single Level Store means never having to worry about where to place files on disk. Storage management spreads data evenly accross all drives. This reduces the likelyhood that all of my data gets piled up on one drive and my really fast processor spends all it's time waiting on 1 (relatively) slow disk.
Single level store allows me to grow files as large as the total of all my disk, without having to have downtime to move them around when they outgrow their current home.
Single Level Store allows the OS to treat Memory and Disk as if they were one and the same. That means my swap file size is equal to the sum of all of my unused disk space. It expands and contracts as I need it to... at the swap file doesn't all get concentrated on one disk either.
Single Level Store means that data storage management is completely left to the OS. All I have to do is make sure that there is enough disks for the job, and Storage Management will handle the rest. I've got more important things to do than.
Single Level Storage also means that as magenetic media dies and the rest of the world moves to solid state storage (as Palm Pilots and other handhelds currently do), that migrating my AS/400 data to solid state storage will be a trivial event. Simply save and restore. File systems that place data on inner and outer rims of platters won't really make sense in a solid state storage world will they?
Actually, I wouldn't think that it will take too long to release a linux-on-OS/400 environment. V4R5 of OS/400 supports AIX 4.33 in the PASE envirnment, and it's just a matter of political will, not technical ability to get linux supported there as well.
The more Linux continues to look threatening to Microsoft, the more likely that IBM will port it to more of it's offerings (they've already ported DB2 to Linux).
Why do companies like IBM spend Development dollars on the PowerPC?
That's easy. Becuase there is so much more to computing than the desktop. The first implementation of the SOI chips will be in the new 8xx models of AS/400's. RS/6000 soon to follow. The AS/400 announcement includes a kick-ass 24-way processor with memory and storage capacity that surpasses IBM's mainframes.
All of this on the _Sixth_ generation of RISC based 64 bit PowerPC chip (Remind me, how much longer until Intel releases a 64 bit chip?).
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Single Level Store is not bizarre, it's brilliant.
Single Level Store means never having to worry about where to place files on disk. Storage management spreads data evenly accross all drives. This reduces the likelyhood that all of my data gets piled up on one drive and my really fast processor spends all it's time waiting on 1 (relatively) slow disk.
Single level store allows me to grow files as large as the total of all my disk, without having to have downtime to move them around when they outgrow their current home.
Single Level Store allows the OS to treat Memory and Disk as if they were one and the same. That means my swap file size is equal to the sum of all of my unused disk space. It expands and contracts as I need it to... at the swap file doesn't all get concentrated on one disk either.
Single Level Store means that data storage management is completely left to the OS. All I have to do is make sure that there is enough disks for the job, and Storage Management will handle the rest. I've got more important things to do than.
Single Level Storage also means that as magenetic media dies and the rest of the world moves to solid state storage (as Palm Pilots and other handhelds currently do), that migrating my AS/400 data to solid state storage will be a trivial event. Simply save and restore. File systems that place data on inner and outer rims of platters won't really make sense in a solid state storage world will they?
MW
Ewan,
Actually, I wouldn't think that it will take too long to release a linux-on-OS/400 environment. V4R5 of OS/400 supports AIX 4.33 in the PASE envirnment, and it's just a matter of political will, not technical ability to get linux supported there as well.
The more Linux continues to look threatening to Microsoft, the more likely that IBM will port it to more of it's offerings (they've already ported DB2 to Linux).
Why do companies like IBM spend Development dollars on the PowerPC?
That's easy. Becuase there is so much more to computing than the desktop. The first implementation of the SOI chips will be in the new 8xx models of AS/400's. RS/6000 soon to follow. The AS/400 announcement includes a kick-ass 24-way processor with memory and storage capacity that surpasses IBM's mainframes.
All of this on the _Sixth_ generation of RISC based 64 bit PowerPC chip (Remind me, how much longer until Intel releases a 64 bit chip?).
Outdated? Beginners? Not in the least.