Wozniak Accepts Post At a Storage Systems Start-Up 183
Hugh Pickens writes "Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is going back to work as chief scientist at Fusion-io, a start-up company that tweaks computers to let them tap vast amounts of storage at very quick rates. In the early days of Apple, Wozniak stood out as one of Silicon Valley's most creative engineers, demonstrating a knack for elegant computer designs that made efficient use of components and combined many features into a cohesive package and Wozniak will do similar work at Fusion-io, although this time with larger server computers and storage systems rather than PCs. 'I have a pretty quiet life, and I like to watch technology evolve,' says Wozniak. 'In this case, I like the people and the product, and said I would like some greater involvement.'"
Good - Stay Busy (Score:5, Insightful)
It's always good to stay busy, and doubly so if you can actually do something that helps grow the existing technology.
And if he can make some cash from this gig, even better!
Go Woz!
Re:Good - Stay Busy (Score:5, Funny)
I hope he can do more than 1 Gig. Let's aim for petabytes, shall we?
Re:Good - Stay Busy (Score:5, Interesting)
Regardless, he is a very skilled hardware hacker. I especially appreciate still to this day the ADB, which was designed (according to legend) in a mere weekend, on the same level of hack-skill as the "Joy wrote vi in a weekend" hacker lore. I just hope he never loses his ability for great pranks, too - that's another personal hero element he has for me.
Keep it up woz, never change.
Re:Good - Stay Busy (Score:5, Insightful)
Heck, if I had the financial freedom to do so, I'd probably spend my time jumping around between startups too. The startup phase is in a lot of ways the best part of a company's life. It's full of boundless optimism and exciting work. It's also full of staggering risk and the ever-present specter of catastrophic failure too, which is why it's not right for everyone.
My brain loves working for startups, but my wallet doesn't. In Woz's case, he doesn't have to worry about the wallet part, so more power to him.
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Agreed. The energy and just get it done attitude in a startup is awesome.
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Well, they do say that some leaders are good in small companies, some are big in large companies, and very few (Gates, Jobs) are good in both start-ups and big companies. Woz is clearly good in start=ups, so why shouldn't he do what he is best at?
Re:Good - Stay Busy (Score:4, Insightful)
a good leader knows when not to lead...
still, im not sure apple is that big, in a number of employees sense. this allowing them to be more agile, and also allows jobs to keep overwatch, in true control freak fashion.
btw, jobs was never much of a engineer. woz have rated him mediocre at best. jobs was always more of a fast talking marketing man.
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My first thoughts when I read the headline were that his Apple stock had tanked and his house was in negative equity. Still, could be worse - he could have invested with Madoff.
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im tempted to claim that big corps are the cancer of the world economy, as they kill of living, productive cells (startups) while absorbing massive amounts of resources just to maintain their existence.
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Keep it up woz, never change.
Woz is a revolutionary. One of his little known projects was a stint working in speeding up waste management [leenks.com].
be new here (Score:5, Funny)
You must be new here.
No, I be new here!
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Yeah he must be bored since its the segway-polo offseason.
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And if it hadn't been for Woz, steve jobs would probably be a used car salesman somewhere. One guy made, essentially singlehandedly, a great product, then by example started the creative environment that led to apple putting out great products.
Steve jobs is good at marketing, but without a first few good products there is no telling where he would have ended up.
I hope Sun buys them (Score:2)
I'd love to see Woz and Andy Bechtolsheim working on a new generation Thumper.
SSD == Turning Point (Score:5, Interesting)
I've had the chance to play with some pretty phenomenal solid state drives (SSD) lately and, I have to say, that I can't believe that there isn't more industry buzz.
In a few months, an extra $100 will probably buy 120GB SSD, which will make a given PC perform like something completely different (you really need to go test drive an SSD PC if you have not yet indulged).
In a decade, I can see handhelds having so much storage and so much processing power, that we'll all just carry around our PC-on-a-phone and just use a standard interface to put that PC on any external monitor and keyboard. Hell, I can USB boot Ubuntu from my Blackberry, already.
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I think his old pal Steve is already on top that one:
http://www.apple.com/iphone/ [apple.com]
Seriously, with a bluetooth keyboard I am able to easily SSH into servers or RDP/VNC into an office machine if something goes wrong. I don't even use my Powerbook anymore for checking Email. The only thing I do use it for is light coding and surfing the web.
I don't have the A/V adapters but I've seen them out there already.
You aren't going to be playing Duke Nukem Forever anytime soon, but the iPhone has already come in handy
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You aren't going to be playing Duke Nukem Forever anytime soon
True, but that has nothing to do with the processing power that you can fit into a phone. Chances are that we'll get 80fps on Crysis on a mobile phone before DNF is even released.
Re:SSD == Turning Point (Score:5, Insightful)
phenomenal solid state drives
Combine the fast access of flash with the organization and optimizations I've seen in ext4, and you'll have an incredible system at the non-volatile storage level, which to me has always fallen behind other advancements like GPUs, processor speed/bus width, and RAM pricing/addressability (goes in hand with 64-bit processors).
:).
With this in mind, I eagerly look forward to my next system because of the long-awaited storage advancements over the last few years, mainly due to filesystem development (well, Linux filesystem development) and SSDs. The only gripe I have right now is the cost, which is falling steadily anyway (despite the economy) so that won't matter when its time to shop around
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Hmm, we will see this soon enough. Due to netbooks there are now a large amount of users with extensive SSD usage, many read-writes. There is no swap, and cache of the browser should be turned of by default, but I already noticed that if my RAM gets full, the eee would write to my harddisk at a high rate.
In practice, if the write operations on the SSD would slowly descrease below a useful level, I would just swap the current SSD disk in my Dell mini, by that time the price, performance and storage would be
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I have to admit that I was concerned about this too as I discussed this issue with an engineer five years ago. However, even the palimpsest of Archimedes [slashdot.org] survives to this day. With digital technologies we can do better. It turns out that by providing wear levelling and planning for the predictable degradation of your media, you can design a controller that provides reliable access to written data transparently to the user, despite the fallibility of the media. With sufficient parallel redundancy you can
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I don't believe that the problem is yet fully solved. A very full disk is going to have problems finding places to write. With that said it seems like a storage device with some ram and some flash in one package might be a superior solution. Perhaps even a small amount of MRAM so no battery is needed? Frequent repeated writes can be cached... And knock out that last reliability problem. (I would be surprised if SSDs today didn't already relocated Least Commonly Used blocks to heavily-written sectors, though
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i think the idea is to double up the amount of flash vs the amount of storage reported to the os. that way you always have a place to dump incoming data, for wear leveling reasons.
hell, you dont even need to double the amount, just having some 10% extra space vs whats reported will allow for some level of wear leveling and fault recovery.
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true, there are a number of spare sectors available in case one or more of the existing ones goes bad.
i think the big diff between hardrives and flash is that on hardrives, errors are discovered at read, while on flash its discovered at write...
No, we DID NOT figure it out. (Score:2)
The fact is that SSDs have severe limitations. It is true that under normal usage, most people might not run into these limitations for a very long time. But we didn't "figure it
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I could, indeed, write a piece of code that would wear out parts of your SSD within days.
Could you? Would you fill the disk almost completely full, and then write and delete the last block over and over with random data 100,000 times per second?
Gee, if they had though of that they might have done something really clever like include a RAM cache and a thousand extra blocks you can't see, and happily report the block written and deleted when it really wasn't, or actually write it to a different physical block each time. They might have had a stroke of genius and included logic to move least-wr
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Not this crap again.
The 100k writes is per block.
If a block fails, it just doesn't get used again, and the chip continues working.
Similarly, it's easy to say that once you've hit 100k blocks, you don't write to that block ever again.
There's a metric fucking shit-ton of blocks in today's SSDs, and they will last longer than the warranty on your slow, noisy, power hungry mechanical harddrive.
What's that? You use harddrives that are out of warranty?
LOL.
Go ahead and laugh (Score:2)
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there are SSD like systems being worked on, that do not have wear issues.
one is MRAM. basically the marriage of magnetic storage and RAM.
another is the recent development of working memristors, altho there the wear issue is still open i guess.
and was there not something similar to MRAM, a kind of horse shoe that stored bits, and had them move back and forth using a charge? ah yes, racetrack memory.
No, YOU are in error. (Score:2)
First you should understand (as I mentioned elsewhere) that I was NOT referring to normal use. Right?
You want to send me an SSD of yours to test? I guarantee I can write a program that will wear portions of it out within a few days. And after that, it is downhill all the way. (With, as you say, continually reduced capacity. Did anybody claim otherwise?)
Put your money where your mouth is. Send me an external SSD (external because
ZFS and SSDs (Score:5, Interesting)
I've had the chance to play with some pretty phenomenal solid state drives (SSD) lately and, I have to say, that I can't believe that there isn't more industry buzz.
Depends on who you ask. The Sun ZFS guys are all over this and are screaming at the top of their lungs about the use of SSDs for both read and write performance:
http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/l2arc_screenshots
http://blogs.sun.com/ahl/entry/hybrid_storage_pools_in_cacm
http://blogs.sun.com/main/tags/fishworks
Sun many have other problems, but engineering talent is not one of them.
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Sun many have other problems, but engineering talent is not one of them.
Doesn't matter if they can't afford to pay said engineers or if layoffs keep occurring at the present rate.
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Does ZFS people work on how to make it perfectly OS X safe with every single HFS+ feature as ".app package", "hidden finder flags" and even "resources"?
I am sure some people confuses OSX with FreeBSD. No, Mac users and even professionals need such features which HFS+ currently provides.
Issue with ZFS is it comes from Sun/Solaris land which really doesn't care about such "lame end user" things. If they demo ZFS perfectly working as native HFS+ on OS X, things could really change. At least for Snow Leopard. B
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What about the life of a modern SSD? Is it true that they have gotten them to get within the threshold of millions of writes? Hard drives are terribly unreliable in practice, but it seems that an SSD would potentially hold up for years and years if you could do millions of writes and didn't swap to the drive. Hell why not just slap a 20GB SSD on the motherboard with linux preinstalled......? Heck, integrate it into the bios for all its worth. Can you say instant on? Maybe we will start seeing devices that c
Re:SSD == Turning Point (Score:5, Informative)
The expected lifetime on the Intel X25-e is about 24 years in an enterprise server. The products of the company in TFA likewise. Use of SLC, sparing, internal error detection and correction, wear levelling and virtual block addressing add up to devices that are not only ridiculously fast - they also last a long time and degrade gracefully [fusionio.com] (pdf).
Both the Intel SSDs and the IODrive are internally massively parallel.
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I want to say that in 5 years the mechanical, magnetic hard drive will be dead, but something tells me that the density will give it an edge for quite a while longer than that unless some major breakthrough occurs in the manufacture of SSD.
Actually in 5 years' time they might be back with a vengeance. See this guy's thesis [stanciu.nl] about Laser-Induced Femtosecond Magnetic Recording
He proved in 2007 that it's possible to use an ultrafast pulsing lasers for demagnetization and magnetization reversal, unleashing a potential recording rate of magnetic media higher than 100 Tbits/second.
Of course, packing femtosecond lasers inside HDDs is nowhere near feasible in the foreseeable future, and neither could the plasmon antennae keep up with the high density
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sounds like the return of the minidisc:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minidisc [wikipedia.org]
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Raid 0 might start to become a lot more interesting if they can prove to be reliable.
This is the fundamental problem when trying to explain why SSDs are so absolutely magically fantastic.
SSDs negate RAID-0. We're talking about drive i/o that is measured in nanoseconds instead of milliseconds. Solid state drives essentially remove i/o from the equation (at least, on the disk). Stacking multiple drives that each have an access time of ~0 isn't going to do you any good.
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Stacking multiple drives that each have an access time of ~0 isn't going to do you any good.
Um. Throughput, mkay? Of course it will help, don't be silly.
C//
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Last time I checked, RAID-0 is useless for access times regardless of the media. The purpose is bandwidth. And it would definitely benefit most SSDs in regards to write speeds.
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I don't see how your link shows I'm dead wrong. I said RAID-0 was good for bandwidth (transfer rates), as opposed to access times (which for hard drives is merely a function of distance and velocity with an obvious maximum and in SSDs a constant, so RAID-0 would do practically nothing aside from maybe increase it by an irrelevant amount, due to processing overhead.) and your link shows exactly that in their HDTach benchmarks on page 3, though they also show that the real world (or at least the world accord
Re:SSD == Turning Point (Score:4, Interesting)
In a decade, I can see handhelds having so much storage and so much processing power, that we'll all just carry around our PC-on-a-phone and just use a standard interface to put that PC on any external monitor and keyboard.
Ok I have heard this a million times now and I just dont see it happening. Cell phones are easily lost, broken, dropped in toilets or stolen. Could you imagine what you would feel if you dropped your pc in the toilet. I can see integrating more tasks into it, but you will still have a need for a base station.
Re:SSD == Turning Point (Score:5, Insightful)
But your base station need not be in your house. Your base station could be network-based storage.
You wouldn't feel too bad about dropping your PC in the toilet if you could get another one at CVS for the price of a couple packs of razor blades.
Such a PC won't be a game station, or scientific number-cruncher, but it could satisfy a rather large niche that is only just now being developed.
Frankly, though, I'm surprised no one has taken a palm, given it a dock that hooks up directly to a large (B&W) LCD monitor and keyboard, as a typewriting and email device.
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Obviously you wouldn't carry around your sensitive data on the phone. That's just daft. It would be stored on a central server somewhere where it's backed up.
Given that, it does indeed seem a bit pointless to rely on plugging in a physical device. More likely you'll just navigate to some web site and have all your applications, data and settings available. This is pretty much already the case for many users.
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They are quite amazing. The company I work for moved its production database servers over to these exact devices several months ago, and now we never have DB performance issues or timeouts.
The bad part, of course, is that slow-DB issues are only discoverable on test or staging servers, and you have to remember to do it. Come to think of it, maybe that's not such a bad thing.
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> 120GB SSD, which will make a given PC perform like something completely different
I take it you've not actually used one of those pieces of garbage yet. My boss bought a dozen of them for our devs, and every single one of the devs has since rejected them. While the read speed and the write speed of the SSD's aren't bad, they're slow as crap when you mix small writes with reads. You know like you do with real world systems like compiling software and with certain database usage patterns. To do a smal
Re:SSD == Turning Point (Score:4, Informative)
Which is why fusion-io is different from normal SSDs. The devices have 20% or more spare capacity and use a log-based FS with block mapping, so your writes don't go through the read/erase/rewrite cycle.
Obviously there is a little slowdown once the 20% has been used up and it goes into garbace-collection mode, but there are plenty of white papers around about steady-state usage (ie once it has started GC) and you can opt to use even less of the physical capacity in order to get more performance. See http://www.oracle.com/technology/deploy/performance/pdf/OracleFlash15.pdf [oracle.com] for example.
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My Hero! (Score:5, Interesting)
Woz was always my hero. I was just a pimply faced kid when I first discovered Apple IIs (or more correctly, Apple II compatibles, since I was from a 3rd world country). Then I started reading about what he did, and his designs and so on. And when AAPL went public, he gave away his own shares to people who helped Apple get off the ground. Very very nice, very down to earth guy, from what I read about him. IIRC, he wanted to sell the Apple Is for $200 or so, and Jobs wanted $2000, and they settled on $666.66.
I was so disappointed when he left Apple and quit working on the Apple II series - that was such a great computer, and ahead of its times.
Woz == "down to earth" (Score:3, Interesting)
I had a very brief close encounter with him, in which I got to ride his Segway. He was, indeed, eminently approachable, with absolutely no "mightier than thou" attitude, self-assured, willing to engage, and very affirming to talk to.
(And that was *before* I recognized him!)
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Something I wrote a few years ago after meeting Wozniak:
Saw Steve Wozniak speak at a local college this past weekend. He's one of my heroes and someone I have consciously emulated throughout my life and career. It's not every day that one gets to meet an icon. Few will disagree that Wozniak started the personal computer revolution....
Technology seems to be about stretches of incremental progress interspersed with head-wrenching forward lurches. Sometimes it is not so much the brilliance of one person, but t
Re:My Hero! (Score:5, Insightful)
HA!
If the mere act of this man taking a job with a start up is enough to make front page Slashdot news... and you call that being a loser. I want to be upgraded to a loser! Where do I sign up?
Re:My Hero! (Score:5, Insightful)
Jobs = marketing guy
Wozniak = engineering geek
If you prefer Jobs over Woz, you're at the wrong website.
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Right... it must be marketing that makes my iMac and suite of iLife and iWork tools with the neato Unix underpinnings work so well together. Woz made stuff. Jobs made stuff work well. BOTH are important.
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jobs was able to talk the right brains, that created the actual working products, into working for him...
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Oh, come on, this is getting old. Jobs is as much just a "marketing guy" as president Obama is. Sure they both need to be able to make pretty speeches, but at the end of the day, they are actually running things.
Jobs created three of my favorite companies: Apple, Pixar and the new Apple. That's all just marketing, is it?
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The difference being that Woz actually MADE the stuff, Jobs managed folks who made stuff.
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Well - Woz's stuff worked. Jobs was able to bring it to the world (and realized it was something the world should be interested in - whether they were aware at the time or not). Apple was really Jobs' thing that he had to talk Woz in to. Of course, Jobs would have nothing to work with if Woz didn't design the stuff in the first place. Very symbiotic.
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Take a strong leader with vision and deprive him of the people that can deliver the technology to realize that vision and you also have an unworkable situation.
I'm not saying one is any better than the other. I see the partnership of Jobs and Woz as very symbiotic; Apple wouldn't have existed without either of them. And the computer world could have been drastically different (although debatable - if it weren't for the Apple II would the TRS-80 or Commodore PET been the "VisiCalc Machine"? They were infe
Re:My Hero! (Score:5, Informative)
OK, let's look at what was available in 1976, when the Apple-1 came out.
In single-board computers, which the Apple-1 was... there was, what, the KIM-1? Amazingly primitive compared to the Apple-1.
In backplane computers, there were the S100 bus machines, which cost significantly more to do what the Apple-1 could do with one board.
Now, for the C64... it came out in 1982, no? Of course some features are going to be advanced beyond what the Apple II could offer at the time. Keep in mind, though, that the Apple II was still quite competitive against the C64.
The Amiga... I'm not gonna dispute that it had better hardware than the Mac. (Although, the Mac arguably had a more intuitive UI.) But, I will use the Apple IIGS, which had by far the best sound chip of anything in its time. (Yes, I'm fully aware that this sound chip was gimped by not offering stereo sound without an add-on board. But still.)
Plus, the Apple II did offer quite a lot of expansion, which is something that many of its competitors lacked (or didn't do as well.)
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I agree with all you said except the IIgs. Perhaps IIgs clones were a timely and thus viable computing platform in the third world - I certainly would not be qualified to comment there. But at least in the US and UK, by the time the Amiga came out, using a IIgs was considered unshakable evidence of insanity. If the choice is between the IIgs "Woz" edition and an Amiga 2500 with an autobooting SCSI controller the choice is clear. CLEAR I SAY! :) On the other hand, I know which I would rather have in a comput
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I wasn't saying that the GS was superior to the Amiga, just that it had a better sound chip. ;) The Amiga did have a faster CPU (well, some will debate that - apparently, if you code tightly enough, a 2.8 MHz 65816 will thrash an 8 MHz 68000, but it's damn difficult to code that tightly, so for all intents and purposes, that 65816 will be much slower,) better graphics, and a better OS (under the hood, anyway - I'll take the Mac and IIGS UI, though.)
That said, the GS is a better //e than the actual //e, with
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Let's say Apple II and C64. In particular the floppy controller, which Woz was responsible for. The C64 drives were very slow and very expensive. They were connected via a serial bus and the drive itself had a cpu that you had to send a fast loader to if you wanted anything better than the glacial performance that the Commodore code would provide. This was the old way of doing things.
The floppy controller on the Apple II, well there really was none. There was a chip where GPIO pins were used for the IO and
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Because he's the engineer behind apples success, jobs was (and is) a ruthless business man taking advantage of a situation as much as he can, as good businessmen do.
The more I looked into apples history, the more it became apparent that jobs really isn't a very nice person. But that wozniak was really in it for the enjoyment and technology.
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Woz - the apple of your i (Score:3, Funny)
ron on sentence much? (Score:4, Funny)
For the sake of easy readability, I'd like to give the grammar nazis somewhere to file all of their remarks.
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ha! ron on little sentence, ron on...
if I had a penny for every failed distributed FS.. (Score:3, Insightful)
tweaks computers to let them tap vast amounts of storage at very quick rates
In other words, Yet Another Half-Baked Clustered/Distributed Filesystem we can add to the list of dozens of failed distributed/clustered filesystems.
Re:if I had a penny for every failed distributed F (Score:4, Interesting)
A cloud-distributed filesystem using each processor's bottom 2 or 3 general-purpose registers as a block for said filesystem, writing the contents only during certain times, or during periods of low access. This allows for lightning fast storage retrieval perfect for a database or large amounts of quickly updating information that needs to be retrieved just as fast, even better if archiving is not preferred after a brief period (think ticker tape), despite the possible redundancy of a RAID backup using said timing mentioned above. limiting factors are the speed of the reader(s), network speed, and bus bandwidth. Registers not used for storage are used for typical processing, aided by the amount of processors involved in cloud computing (think blue-gene).
There ya go, maybe I should make my own startup now?
Re:I didn't do my homework (Score:5, Informative)
In other words, Yet Another Half-Baked Clustered/Distributed Filesystem we can add to the list of dozens of failed distributed/clustered filesystems.
Um... not even close?
This isn't a clustered/distributed anything. It's also not "virtual".
It's a very real, very fast, local storage for very real computers - servers mostly, but if you've got a few grand to blow on an extreme gaming rig, why not go the extra bit to make your levels load faster?
Their quoted numbers are per PCIe X4 device >100,000 IOPS and >640MB/s both reading and writing, and they have independent benchmarks back that up. They're not kidding. The game has changed. This changes everything about how traditional workloads are configured, when you use a SAN vs local disk, how much throughput your apps can get, how many VMs you can run in a server... basically everything in the server world except where you store the data. You still want to store the data in the SAN for redundancy reasons.
Re:I didn't do my homework (Score:4, Informative)
We have these in our production servers right now. They really deliver. They seem to top out at around 60,000 IOPS with EXT3 (the 100K figure was with XFS) but I've hit close to 800MB/s on sequential transfers.
It'll be interesting to see what he comes up with. (Score:5, Interesting)
Storage systems are not trivial pieces of hardware and the range of approaches for handling the problem is staggering.
In the red corner, you've your basic NAS and SAN solutions. In the blue corner, you've direct-disk-to-memory systems using RDMA and Infiniband. In the green corner, you've WAN solutions (SCSI-over-IP, RAID-over-IP).
In the purple corner, you've smarter drives (virtual sectors, filesystems in hardware). In the cyan corner, you've more powerful hardware (many read heads per platter, uber-large RAM caches).
(Knowing Wozniak's reputation for doing things different, he's probably inventing a rhododendron corner.)
There is no shortage of opportunity. However, as with the early home computer market, there is a shortage of consensus on what a storage system actually does, other than "store stuff". That seems to be a world Wozniak does well in - the lack of standards meant the Apple II did well, the presence of standards meant that NeXT didn't. In the current computing world, where standards are everything (especially if they come with pretty holographic stickers), can he do much with the flexibility in the arena?
Re:It'll be interesting to see what he comes up wi (Score:4, Informative)
Let me translate this for you...
These are "LAN Solutions"
"SCSI-over-IP" - iSCSI
"RAID-over-IP" - some volume manager sitting on top of iSCSI
"WAN Solutions":
WAFS (Wide Area File Services) from the likes of Cisco or Riverbed. They optimize CIFS/NFS protocols which are horrible over high latency links.
Infiniband... Dying... besides infiniband used SCSI over IB to a IB to FibreChannel gateway.
Don't forget tape and our friend FICON.
Where can he be flexible? In the past few years we've seen the adoption of:
-Virtual Tape Libraries (tho they've been in the mainframe world for ages)
-Deduplication in Hardware
-Encryption of Data at Rest (in the tape drive; and now in the disk drive)
We've got plenty of CPU power with multi core systems... what about using that for Compression? (Sorry StorageTek did that in the 80s on their Iceberg (aka IBM's RVA Subsystem).
I don't need more capacity, I need to be able to manage it easier.
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Infiniband... Dying...
How do you figure? Infiniband is the absolute final word in minimizing cost per port/density and provides rdma and ultra low latency on crazy high bandwidth connections. There is a reason that companies like NetApp use infiniband for their clustering solutions ;good luck maintaining cache coherency between two or more nodes over something else. Check out how scalable informatics is using IB links on storage boxes that can do over 5k iops at 1500 MB/s
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1500 MB/s? Hmmm. Infiniband allows you to direct one or more lines (up to 12 in any given direction) to a given target and permits switches (and routers, but that adds latency) in that arrangement, so individual packets can be switched from individual input lines to any number of devices.
Currently, Infiniband over PCIe 2.x supports 5 GB/s per line, although any given server is also limited to 5 GB/s. This would limit you to 12 servers and 36 of the storage boxes you mentioned, on a single storage-area netwo
He could be Peewee Herman and sell this (Score:2)
It's a slam dunk. A no brainer. Two years from now you're going to be explaining to some young kid fresh out of college that "this is how we do it now. Forget that stuff they taught you." Again.
Right before you tell her to get off your lawn.
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The startup is on SSDs only. Look up their products page. products [fusionio.com]
So, you're in the wrong ring, though the same building.
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Silly rabbit, Rings are for Tokens! (Or is that Tolkeins? I forget.)
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There is no shortage of opportunity. However, as with the early home computer market, there is a shortage of consensus on what a storage system actually does, other than "store stuff". That seems to be a world Wozniak does well in - the lack of standards meant the Apple II did well, the presence of standards meant that NeXT didn't. In the current computing world, where standards are everything (especially if they come with pretty holographic stickers), can he do much with the flexibility in the arena?
I always thought that the Apple ][ did well because it was cheap and versatile, and that NeXT failed because their machines were outlandishly expensive and proprietary.
Because of his deep background in storage? (Score:2, Interesting)
Not to dismiss what he's done, but for being the chief scientist in a storage startup, it seems like he is a bit underqualified compared to what the cutting edge of storage looks like nowadays.
It seems that it may be more likely they brought him in in order to impress investors, i.e. an investor is more likely to put money into something where they have a big name of an entrepeneur that's struck it big. And it doesn't get much bigger than Wozniak.
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Actually, the Disk ][ was arguably a bigger achievement than the Apple ][ itself, and Woz designed that, too, with no knowledge of how storage worked at the time.
Forget SSD... (Score:5, Insightful)
...yeah, it's the buzzword. It's the current growth area.
Let's consider what The Woz did for floppies Back In The Day. While the early floppy drives are to modern drives the way the Wright Brothers plane is comparable to the B2 Stealth Bomber.... the fact is, The Woz turned the industry on its head. While in one light his contributions can be viewed as an incremental improvement, in every other light, HOLY CRAP HE KICKED SO MUCH ASS when it came to primordial microcomputer disk controllers. He proved that the highest-tech, super-chip-count hyper-expensive controllers could be implemented with a handful of chips.
And he could - COULD! - do it again.
I'm totally behind some company - ANY company - throwing money at The Woz, betting on the off chance he gets another flash of insight and pushes storage technology 20 years further ahead in as many minutes.
Was Woz the Right Genius at the Right Time, or is he a straight-up Hacker's Hacker, who just needs the right operational conditions for his genius to manifest?
Time will tell.
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How much (Score:2)
How much would I need to pay to work there?
It must be like to have Mozart hanging around with your band...
Why do we care? (Score:2)
Woz hasn't done anything interesting in the last thirty years. I recognize his contributions are significant but just because he joins some start-up nobody has ever heard of doesn't mean it's going to be the next Apple or something. I suppose techies need their celebrities too and /. is their tabloid.
One tag is missing... (Score:2, Funny)
TRANSMETA
Re:Since the WSJ couldn't write a tech description (Score:2, Informative)
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Re:Since the WSJ couldn't write a tech description (Score:4, Informative)
The "specialized BIOS" would be a ROM on the card itself - you can boot off of a PCIe SATA or SAS controller, just like you can boot off of a PCI PATA or SATA controller, just like you could boot off of an ISA ST506 or PATA controller.
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I actually set up a poweredge to net boot thanks to the ROM from a 3com card a looong time ago, I forgot about this was even possible because its been so long since I've had a need to do so (and virtually nobody tinkers with the BIOS that much anymore anyhow).
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If by "specialized BIOS", you mean "storage controller firmware on the card", then yes.
This is hardly different from any SCSI or SATA controller on the market, only this one has the "disk" built-in. When the system is POSTing, it triggers every device's initialization routine, which is where a disk controller can let the BIOS know it has (bootable) disks up for grabs.
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It would have an Option ROM, like RAID cards and every other bootable controller does
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Option_ROM [wikipedia.org]
Not using a SATA interface should yield a good performance advantage.
Rock on, Woz
You could have an option Rom, or you could just emulate AHCI (or even ATA) in hardware up to the point the OS loads a native driver, and switch to native mode after that.
Actually I sort of wonder if you couldn't implement an AHCI contoller which talks to flash directly. The bottleneck in SATA is the drive and the SATA bus, not the PCI Express AHCI controller. PCI-E x16 can manage 4,000 MB/s compared to SATA2's 300 MB/s. SATA2 has plenty of bandwidth for a hard disk, but it looks like it will become a bottle
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Twenty years is a long time for a creative type to be mostly kicking back and enjoying the good things in life. Rust sets in quickly, dulling the drive that keeps one working nights and weekends and eating bad takeout food while crazy project deadlines loom. I wonder how much Woz has left.
After that plane crash? Not so much.
For the company, it might not matter. Hiring Woz helps build the brand - people will now have heard of them and start paying attention to them. Like Transmeta hiring Torvalds.
Oh yeah, I
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It has been done before (Score:2, Interesting)
There's nothing new under the sun. We used to do it with system RAM dedicated to the purpose, back in the '80s.
Back in the stone age [techreport.com], we used to do it with RAM in a drive box. And then with add-in cards that acted like disk but stored RAM. I bet you noticed that RAM costs a lot of money if you need 320 GB of it. For a brief moment so long ago that I forget the date, we did it with something called "bubble memory".
I also talked about this here two or three years ago, before this product was produced, s
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RAM isn't all that expensive any more. DIMMs are still spendy but every mini system under the sun seems to have a gig of ram soldered to it now. (well, some of these $150 units have like 512MB, but you can't blame them. They're coming up anyway.) And if someone can get down the cost on some of this memory that doesn't require refreshing then memory will get a lot simpler, with cost benefits similar to DRAM vs SRAM... but with performance benefits similar to SRAM vs DRAM.