It would be nice if more communications protocols achieved feature parity with Ethernet. Or even USB. Give me a hard drive with a connector I can plug into a hub or switch and just keep daisy chaining the oldest hardware deeper and deeper, instead of needing a robot to physically move them around. It’s not like adding a couple microseconds to response time will even be noticed on a crappy old hard drive.
Add a deep sleep mode and bam, you got a stew goin’.
As I'm sure you're aware, there was such a thing. But market segmentation was used to turn it into a higher super-enterprise tier. Unless you care a lot about latency variance, there is no reason why those two sets of protocols (networking and storage) shouldn't have converged a long time ago. Admittedly, 20 years ago there were some bandwidth issues due to run lengths, but those are long gone.
The market is simultaneously the hand that giveth and taketh away
Are you talking about PCIe fabrics? There was a moment there where I thought a shiny future was ahead of us and then… nothing. Still bitter about that.
Or was this tried another way? I’m hoping that open firmwares create an environment where we can start treating the computer as a network. It’s a slim hope but not entirely insane.
I was taking about Fibre Channel...same drive with a different controller would cost 2x, and the switches and management software were just obscenely priced.
there was also iscsi. I tried to use to it in a couple jobs and it was really poorly performing, and not very reliable. I _suspect_ that's just because it was never paid attention to properly? maybe because it was using TCP instead of a reliable but unordered protocol.
thinking about it, I'm off on the bandwidth numbers. SSDs move out quite a bit...so maybe you wouldn't replace your primary OS drive. But for secondary and tertiary storage ethernet drivers would really be nice
PCIe fabrics are still kicking around. I agree that's another enabling technology that just hasn't found a home. You would think with this USBc stuff that would suddenly be of great interest.
just to round it out, there was another short-term effort around..2000 I think to extend infiniband to support remote and aggregate devices. TopSpin was a big name before they got acquired by Cisco. I think that would have been a great direction...especially since IB got pretty cheap
Nope. That’s consolidated storage usually mediated by a device that manages things. I’m talking about a more ad hoc system. Synology is great until I need one more drive than I have bays.
Add a deep sleep mode and bam, you got a stew goin’.