Abstract
The bandwidth of servers has increased at the rate of Moore’s law over the last ten years and current interfaces have enabled communication and data sharing at the same rate. Infiniband coupled clusters served by multicore systems have become commodity standards. At the same time the random access bandwidth of disk drives has remained static over the same period.The result of this dramatic mismatch is that storage systems have grown in size and complexity so that the aggregate performance of a large number of disk drives is used to satisfy the demands of clustered systems. The problem posed by this mismatch is that a large number of mechanical devices must be used to efficiently serve even the most conservative cluster architectures. In general the service requirements of I/O systems greatly exceed the requirements of the cluster considering the quantity of elements of each system and the mechanical uncertainties of the storage system. This problem is exacerbated by the current market demand for the most cost effective disk drives available lowering the overall system reliability. A storage architecture will be discussed that limits these service requirements and the resultant human interface.