Henry Newman is out with his Top Ten Storage Predictions for 2011:
There will not be huge changes next year because there has not been a great deal of investment in technology over the last two to three years. Some of the predictions below are things I expected to happen much sooner when the economy was better, and with a slight glimmer of economic improvement I am hoping these technologies will finally make it into the mainstream.
Henry’s predictions of particular interest to the HPC crowd include:PCIe 3.0 hits the market, but no 16-lane slots or cards. PCIe 3.0 doubles performance over PCIe 2.0 per lane, and today even mid-range motherboards have PCIe 2.0 16-lane slots. In 2011 we will not see performance per lane double for PCIe 3.0 but we will just have 8-lane slots on motherboards and 8-lane cards. Given that CPU and memory bandwidth performance has significantly increased, the lack of PCIe bus bandwidth increase in 2011 will impact I/O performance, and what might be hurt most is PCIe-based SSDs.
- SSDs will achieve 2,000,000 IOPS performance. PCIe-based SSDs recently hit the one million IOPS mark and it is likely that two million IOPS will be possible next year.
- SAS RAID/JBOD cards will hit 1,000,000 IOPS. SAS-based JBOD cards are making huge performance strides and some RAID cards now have performance that it as good as many external RAID devices. The one million IOPS number is a big jump, but I think it will happen in late 2011.
- pNFS products will finally be released. The pNFS framework has finally been released in the Linux kernel and vendors are starting to create pNFS layout drivers for NAS devices and file systems. 2011 should be the year of pNFS product releases from a number of vendors.
