Slinky 2.0 (or, Adaptive Storage Networking in a 10 Gigabit Ethernet World)
It's Slinky, it's Slinky, for fun it's a wonderful stack. It's Slinky, it's Slinky, it's fun for an ACK and a NAK!
Between FAST '08 and this week's launch of Windows Server 2008, I've been thinking a lot about self-tuning performance/scalability of storage networking stacks -- especially with the (eventual) adoption of 10 Gigabit Ethernet in data centers.
For example, the (new) Next Generation TCP/IP stack -- or "tcpip.sys" in Windows Server 2008 -- renders several (older) Windows Registry settings obsolete.
Same is true for Brocade's Fabric OS 6.0 and their whole Data Center Fabric (DCF) initiative: Being able to identify I/O patterns, QoS volumes, and perform traffic isolation are all necessary to simplify storage management.
Also recently discovered an interesting research paper (from NetApp's R&D unit, ATG):
Storage I/O stacks have lots of growth potential over the next decade -- at the host layer, within the fabric, as well as the storage array itself.
Stay tuned for my continuing deep-dive discussion on this topic!
