Architecting The Future.Practical, as well as conceptual, comprehensive, and judicious, written in a down-to-earth, no-nonsense style, "Building Storage Networks" is unreservedly recommended and not just by me. Michael Peterson says, "It should be on top of everybody's reading list." Amen. Marc Farley's magisterial new book covers it all, from I/O (Input/Output) The transfer of data between the CPU and a peripheral device. Every transfer is an output from one device and an input to another. See PC input/output. I/O - Input/Output , mirroring, caching, RAID, SAN, NAS (1) See network access server. (2) (Network Attached Storage) A specialized file server that connects to the network. A NAS device contains a slimmed-down operating system and a file system and processes only I/O requests by supporting the popular , FC, SCSI SCSI in full Small Computer System Interface Once common standard for connecting peripheral devices (disks, modems, printers, etc.) to small and medium-sized computers. SCSI has given way to faster standards, such as Firewire and USB. , ESCON (Enterprise Systems CONnection) An IBM S/390 fiber-optic channel that transfers 17 Mbytes/sec over distances up to 60 km depending on connection type. ESCON allows peripheral devices to be located across large campuses and metropolitan areas. , clustering, and the Internet to new technologies like VIA and InfiniBand. The discussion of the last two may be an introduction to many readers. Virtual Interface Architecture The Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA) is an abstract model of a user-level zero-copy network, and is the basis for InfiniBand and iWARP. Created by Microsoft, Intel, and Compaq, the original VIA sought to standardize the interface for high-performance network technologies known as is a new method or establishing application-to-application remote memory accesses over a network. InfiniBand is a new serial I/O channel targeted for replacing the PCI bus. Both, though works in progress, hold much promise for the future. Farley, vice president at SanCastle (www.sancastle.com) and contributor to CTR (see his article beginning on page 26 of this issue) has written the book we've all been waiting for. Published by Osborne/McGrawHill, it sells for $44.99. The Storage Network Blueprints section alone is more than worth the price. |
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