[cagenut]

Its really fascinating to watch amazon re-learn/re-implement the lessons IBM baked into mainframes decades ago. Once you get out of shared-nothing/web-scripting land you realize that I/O is much more important and difficult than cpu. What amazon calls EBS IBM has been calling "DASD" forever. I wonder if there are any crossover lessons that they haven't taken advantage of because there just aren't any old ibm'ers working at amazon.

[blantonl]

IBM's implementation of DASD on the mainframe was always implemented under the assumption that it was a secondary storage medium for data. Meaning, it wasn't accessed often, and it wasn't implemented for top performance.

Think of a bridge between high performance disk and tape.