Storage News

Oracle: Reasons to Love Tape

During a recent Oracle strategy webcast, EVP John Fowler praised flash and said tape has a future. According to this report on The Register, Fowler is Oracle's top dog for server and storage systems and it's worth paying attention to what he likes and dislikes.

This is what Fowler thinks about disks: 'They're really old, and they fail a lot', likening them to TV tubes and the transistor, and saying that there's going to be a tidal wave of development in storage. In the supercharged world of server processing he's outlining there will be no willingness to have threads and cores wait for disk I/O. Like today's supercomputers it's going to be all about building a pipeline with the right capacity, latency and speed to feed and receive data from the hundreds of cores executing Oracle or SAP apps and keeping them busy. Logically there is no place for disk as a primary data storage tier in this scenarios.

"Fowler reckons that servers and storage are changing as we speak and will change even more as his development people get the deep insight into what the big iron applications need. There's going to be a constant escalation in system performance because of what his people will do in developing servers and storage. He also says storage is going to come down in price over the next five years, saying it's one of the most expensive and challenging to manage items in data centres today, and that is going to change."