History of storage technology: from tape to hardware liquefaction

Information is the way people perceive the outside world , The initial information will correspond to an object or related description of the real world . Human beings 、 Perfect the information to contact 、 Knowing and changing the world .

At first, humans relied on synapses in the brain to store information , But some information is so important , So people think of every way to keep this information . So man invented a kind of information to describe information , This information is data .

Data can be stored on a physical medium , Actually , stay “ speak ” In the process of , Air can be regarded as a transient physical medium . Humans vibrate their vocal cords to produce waves in the air , Sound waves can be briefly retained and diffused in the air , Different waveforms carry different data , This wave is received by the tympanic membrane , It achieves the effect of data transmission .

however , Air can only hold information for a moment , Then it's up to the brain . People are born, old and die , Besides word of mouth , Human beings need more reliable data storage methods and longer-term physical media . in the past , Human beings save data on stone slabs 、 On the bamboo slips , Later, people saved data on paper , Matching printing , So that information can be spread and preserved for a long time on a large scale .

After man learned to carry information in the form of electromagnetic waves , Distance is no longer the limit of information transmission , But the telephone is nothing more than talking from a distance , A telegram is nothing more than a letter sent by express mail , Finally, all the information should return to the eyes constructed by nature 、 Ears and brains . Until the advent of the computer , Human beings can finally break through the physiological limit of processing information , Let programs and circuits process information instead of themselves .

1928 year , Audio tapes that can store analog signals are available , Each tape is magnetized to different degrees according to the strength of the audio signal current , So that the sound is recorded on the tape .1951 year , Tape began to be used in computers , The earliest tape drives can transmit every second 7200 Characters .20 century 70 Small tape cartridges appeared in the late s , Recordable approx 660KB The data of .

1956 year , The world's first hard disk drive appears , application stay IBM Of RAMAC305 In the computer , This drive can store 5M The data of , The transmission speed is 10K/S, It marks the beginning of the era of disk storage .1962 year ,IBM First removable hard drive released , It has six 14 Inch disc , Storable 2.6MB data .1973 year ,IBM Invented the Wynn hard disk , It is characterized in that the magnetic head is suspended above the high-speed rotating disc during operation , Without direct contact with the disk , This is the prototype of modern hard disk .

1967 year ,IBM The company launched the world's first floppy disk . The next thirty years , Floppy disks were all the rage , Become the first removable media used in personal computers . This initially had 8 Inch big guy , It can be saved 80K Read only data . Four years later , A read-write floppy disk was born . In the 1990s , The floppy disk size is gradually reduced to 3.5 Inch , The storage capacity has gradually increased to 250M. end 1996 year , There are as many as 50 Billion floppy disks are used . until CD-ROM（ CD ROMs ,Compact Disc Read-Only Memory）、USB After the storage device appears , Floppy disk sales began to decline .

Get into 21 century , The explosion of information has led to a doubling of the amount of data , Hard disk capacity is also soaring , The capacity of a single disk has reached TB Level . even so , The storage capacity and speed provided by a single disk are far from meeting the actual business needs , Disk array came into being . Disk array uses redundant array technology of independent disks （RAID） Store the same data on multiple hard disks , Input and output operations can be overlapped in a balanced manner , Improved disk performance , Increased MTBF and fault tolerance .RAID As a high performance 、 Highly reliable storage technology , It has been widely used .

21 Since the 20th century , Computer storage technology is developing rapidly , How to quickly and efficiently provide data for the computer to assist it to complete the operation has become a new breakthrough in storage technology . stay RAID Technology to achieve high-speed mass storage , The emergence of network storage technology has weakened the space constraints , Make the use of data more free .

Networked storage extends the storage system to the network , The storage device exists as a node of the entire network , Provide data access services for other nodes . Even if the computing host itself does not have a hard disk , Data on other storage devices can still be accessed over the network . Based on network storage technology , Distributed cloud storage 、 Disaster recovery backup 、 Virtualization and cloud computing have been widely used . among ,“ Hardware liquefaction ” And “ Storage resources revitalize the system ” Is one of the latest technical directions .

If you take all the distributed hardware as a whole , All data are uniformly defined and stored , Make the most of all the hardware , It will not only eliminate data islands , It will also improve the overall hardware utilization , Disguised form “ create ” New resources , Save the purchase of new equipment and its supporting software 、 Cost of service facilities . This concept of all hardware as a whole is “ Hardware liquefaction ”, namely , Break up the hardware resources originally based on each server 、 restructuring , Make it flow like a liquid wherever it is needed , Dissolve the data island in the ocean of hardware liquefaction .

Storage resource revitalization system is one of the products that implement the idea of hardware liquefaction , It is a pure software storage controller , Can be installed in any Linux Server , It can integrate the scattered disks in each server into a high-performance storage resource pool , The distributed dual controller architecture ensures low latency 、 High availability 、 Easy to expand features ; Through the perfect console 、 Command line and API To uniformly schedule and manage all storage devices ; Make full use of all storage resources through strong compatibility and unique hardware heterogeneity .

Storage resources activate the system without exclusive hardware resources , It can be deployed on the same set of hardware equipment with existing applications , Integrate idle storage resources without affecting the operation of existing businesses , Help users to uniformly manage the devices in the existing server cluster with low utilization of storage resources , Form a unified storage resource pool . Can be deployed based on heterogeneous hardware , compatible x86、ARM、 Platform equipment such as Godson . It can pass the standard iSCSI The protocol provides virtual services for upper layer applications Target And logic volume , It provides distributed block storage services and can be flexibly scheduled 、 Distribute 、 Use .

Reference material ：

Store little white - Why storage is needed

China academy of information and communications - Next generation data storage technology research report

Wikipedia - Computer storage technology

IDC-《IDC FutureScape: Global cloud computing 2020 In predicting —— China's Enlightenment 》.

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