What are the disadvantages of unified storage over independent block and file systems?

What are the disadvantages of unified storage over independent block and file systems?

There are some compromises that you'll need to make; there are certainly some control granularity issues. The pattern of access for file-based data and block-based data is significantly different.

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In file-based data, you'll probably be sending longer streams of data and typically not have the "locality of reference" that you might have in block-based access where you may be doing transaction processing and so on. So the data residency in cache and the management of cache is dramatically different -- and many [unified or multiprotocol storage] systems don't have the capability to discern file-based access, apply dedicated resources, utilize optimized caching algorithms or manage data transfers. This is different from block-based systems that are typically tuned to handle individual blocks and employ cache residency algorithms.

As a result, a lot of these [unified or multiprotocol storage] systems don't have the granularity of control needed to understand how to handle file-based I/O versus block-based I/O. This leads to compromises in performance and could lead to variability in performance. As you move into more performance-critical environments, consistency of performance becomes more important. If a block-based application is combined on a system that has more dynamic file-based access, users can experience variability in performance because of resources allocated to the file-based side.

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This was first published in February 2007

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