Storage Requirements Have Dramatically Changed

Information Week’s George Crump explores the future of storage infrastructure and storage interface in this article. The requirements of the storage infrastructure have changed dramatically and need the ability to handle more random I/O, deliver higher IOPS performance, and take away some of the load from the primary CPU, claims Crump. Another capability that is emerging in interface cards is card-level virtual switching that allows two virtual machines (VMs) on a single physical host to communicate with each other offloading some of the responsibility of the hypervisor.

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"Performance is more than just high bandwidth. It is also how intelligently can that card use that bandwidth? A good example of this is the quality of service (QoS) capabilities that we are seeing in today's interface cards. Similar QoS capabilities at the switch-level cards will allow you to set priorities on the card. Ideally used in a virtualized server environment, these cards can provide more bandwidth to more mission critical servers when they need it. This allows you to better maintain SLAs for those mission critical applications.”

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