The emerging paradigm shift in storage system architectures

It is argued that currently dominant, large-scale storage architectures, built around central, shared storage systems with CPU-connected devices, are reaching economic and technological limitations and no longer meet performance, capacity, and transparency requirements. Models of historical scientific and technological paradigm shifts are reviewed, and the reasons why the authors believe such a paradigm shift is underway in storage system architectures are discussed. The requirements to be met, important technical problems being investigated, such as network-connected devices, use of storage hierarchies, and system management, and the characteristics of the emerging large-scale, distributed, storage-architecture paradigm are described and illustrated by actual implementations and by standardization work under way in the IEEE Storage System Standards Working Group.< >