On Thu, Oct 04, 2007 at 10:26:24PM -0700, Jonathan Loran wrote: > I can envision a highly optimized, pipelined system, where writes and > reads pass through checksum, compression, encryption ASICs, that also > locate data properly on disk. ...
I've argued before that RAID-Z could be implemented in hardware. But I think that it's all about economics. Software is easier to develop and patch than hardware, so if we can put together systems with enough memory, general purpose CPU horsepower, and memory and I/O bandwidth, all cheaply enough, then that will be better than developing special purpose hardware for ZFS. Thumper is an example of such a system. Eventually we may find trends in system design once again favoring pushing special tasks to the edge. When that happens I'm sure we'll go there. But right now the trend is to put crypto co-processors and NICs on the same die as the CPU. Nico -- _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
