Techno Musings

While from this summer I do want to point out that within 2009 Hitachi talked about a demonstration of its realtime streaming operating system called Tactix.  The press release can be found here and points to the improvements offered over the previous prototype.  For more details on the system itself I suggest that you head over here to visit an interview with Mr. Tadashi Takeuchi who is a researcher at the Systems Development Laboratory.  This prototype offers performance of 10x over a traditional COTS based approach — something like OS X Server with Darwin Stream Server.  (Note that Tactix uses the same kind of Intel Architecture hardware as COTS systems do, saying that this system achieves its benefits through a specially tuned operating system and not special hardware.  Further as Intel and AMD continue to evolve and the underlying SAN storage infrastructure continues to evolve so too will the performance of Tactix.)

Some interesting tidbits from the interview:

• Here Takeuchi-san points out that the super majority of the performance bottleneck (87% for the OS and 13% for the application) for COTS streaming server configurations comes from the underlying OS and not the application.  Therefore this has led Hitachi to develop an operating system tuned specifically for the function of streaming video, etc.
• Next I want to point out the innovations that the researchers applied to Tactix making it so damn fast: adoption of zero-copy I/O as well as isochronous scheduling assist the performance in becoming significantly superior to the competition.  As you can see from here the 2007 prototype uses these innovations to be 5x better than Company A and Company M (you can guess the A and M if you are really creative).

Again this points to Hitachi’s ability to invest in the fundamentals to achieve better scale and performance on a minimum of hardware. We can see it in the Gazopa search service, the AMS, the USP-V, and now with Tactix.