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There's a revolution that is unfolding in the data storage community. It has long been argued that the distinctly different server and storage hardware worlds were set to collide, and that servers will emerge as the ultimate winner. The concept and debate started gathering pace when Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, published findings now referred to as 'Moore's Law', which predicted that the number of transistors per square inch on densely integrated circuits would double approximately every 2 years.

As a result, systems were able to accomplish most processing tasks by sharing a common fast processor, the CPU, and the focus turned to amplifying clock speeds in order to run application workloads faster. As time went on, heat and power issues became an obstacle to faster clock speeds. This resulted in the 2 year 'tick-tock' of innovation shifting the transistor increases to instead drive multi-core processing designs - putting more CPUs on each chip. Traditional storage vendors struggled to keep pace, but it wasn't until the emergence of hypervisors, densely packed virtual infrastructures and VDI that specialised storage systems began to significantly lag behind.

They could no longer keep up with Moore's Law and the rapid pace of performance advances and cost efficiencies. The gap between servers and storage started to irrevocably widen. To remain competitive mergers started to become commonplace. The storage world's biggest player merged - amid great speculation Dell bought EMC - but why? Dell recognised the inevitable need to merge the server and storage worlds in order to survive. Today, the stage is set, the die is cast, with the advances and economics of multi-core processing and the emergence of parallel I/O software, business productivity is being revolutionised and the way we do storage going forward is being transformed.

A PRODUCTIVITY REVOLUTION
The modern microprocessor universe started in the 1970's, and it drove two major paths of technology advances. The first path resulted in faster more efficient uniprocessors which directly led to the PC revolution and to today's pervasive use of microprocessors in everything from smart phones to intelligent devices. The second route was through parallel computing which set out to harness the power of many microprocessors.

While parallel computing started with a flurry, the pace of advance was stifled by the lack of commodity parallel computing hardware and the lack of available software to conduct parallel work. These factors, set against the rapid pace of advances in uniprocessor clock speeds that resulted from Moore's Law, kept parallel computing firmly in the background and for the most part, it remained an exotic discipline which required too much specialisation for more general business use.

WHERE IS THE ENABLING SOFTWARE?
With today's multi-core systems, parallel processing power is now readily available, but there is still a lack of software to fully use its power. The promised parallel computing revolution as a generic capability was effectively put on hold waiting for the software to catch up. Thankfully, we are now at that critical turning point.

The right software can enable the role of storage to become just another application workload. Storage devices can all be virtualised and the services they provide can be delivered via software-defined storage solutions harnessing the power of the multi-core servers.

DataCore has worked tirelessly over the past decade to incorporate this inevitable shift within their software platform. DataCore's founders came from the parallel computing world and therefore their software has always been optimised for parallel processing. In a way, they were ahead of their time. They needed multi-core processing to advance to the stage it is now in order to exploit its full potential.

To prove the point, DataCore's software enabled with parallel I/O technology recently set a new world record on price-performance on a hyper-converged platform (on the Storage Performance Council's peer reviewed SPC-1 benchmark). DataCore also reported the best performance per footprint and the fastest response times ever. These industry benchmarks prove that using today's multi-core X86 servers and enabled software can truly achieve far more with less and dramatically change the economics and productivity that can be achieved.

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