Last night I had this strange dream where I was literally arranging the interior walls of a hotel on a very high floor. I’d grab a wall and drag it into place then another one. For some reason it seemed like my task was to create the most efficient use of space. This got me pondering this morning.
Why not use Software Defined Storage in a new and unique way like a multidimensional array. Building off my earlier post of elevator to the cloud, it might be possible to make storage much more efficient. Instead of just two dimensional storage lets make it multidimensional.
If you look at how to most systems (and storage admins) work with storage its all in a 2D construct. There is a page and we can slide it around in a 2D plane. We can’t stack anything on top of it or define any additional dimensions to that page. Its all stuck in a flat structure.
With the advent of cloud and software defined storage we are unchained from having to use flat constructs such as pages to build our data sets. Why because we’ve abstracted how we are storing data. We aren’t storing our data on a single disk device or storage array. Data can be anywhere. Accessed by different readers simultaneously or in sequence. And that read/write operation can happen along any axis or dimension in relatively any order.
My programming friends would probably recognize this c++ statement:
int storage[5][5][5][5];
The above statement defines a 4D array or 5^4 or 625 blocks. You can think of this if you like as being a cube 5 inches square with a time of 5 minutes (a forth dimension).
Now I can build data in a cloud to fit into each one of those blocks. I can then manipulate where those blocks are to form a highly efficient storage structure that represents anything I want.
I guess you could even pull out the calculus and define irregular shapes for your data (lets say a shape of a cloud). The only reason to use a non-cubed shape is if that structure made your data more efficient to use.
The one thing that I’ve noticed while writing this post is that it could parallel the movie the Matrix at some point. My only question at that point is who is the Architect? Paul Maritz or someone else?
Cheers,
Tony
