Making Storage Smarter

Abstraction of storage through protocols, such SCSI and increased storage virtualization, while having the effect of improving compatibility and flexibility of storage, has the adverse effect of isolating the intelligence in storage products from the awareness of how storage is used by applications. It would be extremely useful to penetrate the walls brought about by protocol and abstraction, between storage and application, to enable storage to better accommodate the actions and events at the application. This is not a new concept and has sometimes been called “Intelligent Storage.” Perhaps a better term is "Storage Intelligence Coupling" because it enables storage to make better decisions predicated on desired behavior at the application level. This talk discusses some of the many challenges to achieving this objective, a few proprietary approaches that have been taken, and the outlook for the future.

Learning Objectives

Understand the negative impact of storage abstraction for Quality of Service
Learn why Intelligent Storage has been difficult to build and bring to market
Learn of proprietary approaches to Intelligent Storage
Learn of possible changes in the storage stack that might help make Intelligent Storage possible