Claus's Blog

My last blog, “Binary”, covered our recent Geek Day (Blogger Day) outside of London and some of our observations surrounding them. This time I’ll be covering another event: the recent Spring SNW in Santa Clara, down the road from HDS. The event occurred two weeks ago, but I want to bring up a subject that surfaced in my presentation, and I’d like to pose this to the wider audience here.

As I travel around, meet with customers, travel, present, talk, fly, present and fly, I like to ask questions. One of the questions I’ve been asking recently relates to Moore’s Law. Let me explain.

Since the beginning of time (as defined by when storage was invented), the “size” of the processor (MIPS, GIPS, etc.) has determined the I/O load expected by storage arrays. That is, if you double the processor speed, you also double the I/O load – pretty basic arithmetic. So, when Gordon Moore predicted that processor speeds would double every 24 months, us storage guys took note and assumed “The Law” applied to us as well. More accurately, he said that the number of transistors that could be placed on an IC would double every 2 years, but you get the idea. The plumbers out there also took note, which is why FC speeds double at about the same rate. Got it? Moore’s Law applies to everything!

Now before I get into the question about “The Law,” I should reveal that I have never in my career been NDA’d by Intel, AMD, or any other chip manufacturer. My closest encounter was all those old annoying “Intel Inside” stickers that seemed to have been slapped on just about everything I purchased. So what I’m posing here is pure speculation and curiosity on my part.

The subject of my session at SNW (which was shared with HDS’ esteemed Michael “Heff” Heffernan and a great customer of ours, Jerry Sutton, from TSYS) was server virtualization and its impact on storage.

I started it off and described a couple of server trends that are impacting storage. One such trend was that server utilization has gone from 10% (generally accepted industry average, or GAIA, I made that acronym up) to 40%-50% with server virtualization (another GAIA, and great argument for scale-up storage, incidentally). That doesn’t mean we’re (us storage folk) seeing a 50% spike in IOPS, but we’re definitely seeing increases above the norm. I doubt anyone would argue that!

This brings me to the question I asked of the SNW audience. Watching various announcements, speculations, and rumors on pending 48-core, 64-core, and 128-core processors, is “The Law” still relevant? Are we exceeding it? Does it still apply? When asked, no one raised their hand that we were slowing down. Two raised their hand that it still applies, and about 10 indicated that Moore’s Law does not apply (for servers) and that we are, in fact, accelerating. The others had obviously fallen asleep by then, or otherwise declined to vote.

Personally, for me, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays I believe we are accelerating. Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, I think not. Sundays I don’t think at all. So, I’m really curious as to what others think.

Are we actually accelerating our compute capabilities? I think this makes for an interesting discussion, so let’s discuss. History will be the ultimate arbiter, but let’s at least ask the question.