


However, the dissociation of storage from servers was a significant step forward: this made it possible to design the first "complex" architectures to ensure high application availability. But not yet to read or write simultaneously from several machines, due to the difficulty of managing competing entries. It then became possible to share a storage space between several servers. Then came the Storage Area Network (SAN), a network attached hard disk system that allows a machine to access storage space via the Fibre Channel protocol in client/server mode. This led to the appearance of Direct Attached Storage (DAS), which is the ability for a computer to access a disk connected to the machine as a device. The first technological breakthrough involved dissociating the storage system from the server, and allowing it to consume disks other than those placed inside its own chassis. However, this vertical resizing (scale-out) sooner or later reaches its limits: that of the server chassis. And eventually to tackle performance issues.Then for data protection (with the advent of RAID, the concept of which was first defined in the late 1980s).Servers, on the other hand, were quickly designed to accommodate multiple disks. Most personal computers have always had a single hard disk. When the first microcomputers were developed in the 1970s, the 8-inch floppy disc was considered a "high-speed" storage device and could contain an entire operating system! PHASE 1ĭissociate the storage system from the server Except that the size of the files handled by computers kept on growing. A hard disk contained the information read and written locally by the machine, via the motherboard from a physical point of view, and through the operating system from a logical point of view. Initially, the storage could not be dissociated from the server. The smallest storage unit within a computer system, with an original size of 4KB (Kilobytes), or 4096 bytes and as many memory areas equivalent to 0 or 1, through which information can be stored in digital form. Let's go on this journey of discovery together! In the beginning was the block
#Computer file storage software#
So many layers of abstraction have been added over the years between hardware and software that uncovering their history can be like an exercise in caving or archeology. The parallel history of storage modes, from block storage to object storage, is less well known, probably because its roots lie in the lower layers of IT. The death of such solutions was announced prematurely, in fact volumes are still increasing today! This progression hasn’t yet resulted in a complete transfer of data to the "cloud", as shown by the persistence of archiving on magnetic tapes. almost all of us have held one or more of these evolutions of storage in our hands.
#Computer file storage zip#
Disks, ZIP disks, CD-ROMs, DVDs, flash memory, SATA, SSD or NVMe disks. The history of storage media, from perforated cards to recent attempts to store information in DNA strands, is well documented. In this blog post, I’ll take a brief journey through the history of computing and the storage systems which have been strongly influenced in recent decades by the three phenomena:Ĭomparison table: block, files and object storage A deep dive into the foundations of computer systems
