back to article Nexsan unparks iSCSI attack on EMC and NetApp

Nexsan has introduced SAN support with the iSeries, a virtualising iSCSI head sitting on top of its SATA and SAS arrays, which include AutoMAID spin-down technology. Nexsan is most well-known for its power-saving SATABeast arrays offering up to 42TB of capacity in a 4U box. There is also the smaller SATABoy (14TB in 3U). The …

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  1. Simon Casey

    Bad choice of name...?

    Erm, don't IBM have copyright over iSeries? i.e the AS/400 brand?

    For a moment I thought another storage company had jumped in and started supporting the platform.

  2. Henry Cobb
    Flame

    When can I query a disk?

    The computer is the bottleneck here.

    Why force all the data to be loaded into one computer before selecting just the data that's actually needed?

    Given the falling prices for CPU cores, when will we have a CPU that runs directly on the disk cache?

    Then you can finally get to reasonable size disk arrays because the array controller will simply send SQL queries to the disks and only the matching records will use up bandwidth on the way back.

    It's almost tempting to do that today with ATOM motherboards that have a few drives plugged into them and connect back through ethernet switches and routers. The result is a database server that's as scalable as the Internet itself. There just needs to be a little bit more software support so that blank units can be plugged into the array and boot into an automated setup process that formats their disks and spreads data onto them. Then put one LED on the front that's starts yellow, turns green and flashes red when the unit needs to be replaced.

  3. Simon Casey

    @ Henry

    We have got that. For instance the DS6000/DS8000 series of IBM disk arrays run Power5/Power5+ cores that run in their iseries/pseries/linux boxes. You've got a 4/8 core box with up to 256Gb of ram running the disk caching.

    I like your latter idea I admit :) You'd want a bit more resiliency though and of course raiding across a cluster brings it's own issues eventually when you scale. Buses in large systems can only span a certain distance and thruput. Once you've exceeded those and going outside of the bus that all the CPUs chat to and have some sort of interconnecting you're going to slow down.

    Bring on the idea of a Bluegene/L type of machine with 64/128 bit addressing for storage and then we're talking.

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