Garth Gibson, author of the seminal paper which presented the redundant array of inexpensive independent disks (RAID) to the world, has a nice quick interview over at eWeek. It’s worth a read, since Gibson’s long been on the forefront of storage tech.
He talks about how parallel NFS (pNFS) is set to trickle down to the enterprise from the high-performance compute labs. It’s always amusing to me to think of things trickling down to the enterprise storage market, but in this case he’s right – massive clusters (and Panasas for that matter) have yet to make much of a mark on the enterprise computing world.
He goes on to talk about how escalating disk capacity has lead to unacceptable rebuild times in RAID sets. You tell ’em, Garth! Apparently, he’s been beating the multiple-parity drum since 1989 (!?!) – I hadn’t realized that RAID 6 was that old, since it’s not in the paper, but he claims they invented it, too, way back when. Who am I to contradict the Bob Metcalfe of storage?