A case for intelligent disks (IDISKs)

Decision support systems (DSS) and data warehousing workloads comprise an increasing fraction of the database market today. I/O capacity and associated processing requirements for DSS workloads are increasing at a rapid rate, doubling roughly every nine to twelve months 38. In response to this increasing storage and computational demand, we present a computer architecture for decision support database servers that utilizes “intelligent” disks (IDISKs). IDISKs utilize low-cost embedded general-purpose processing, main memory, and high-speed serial communication links on each disk. IDISKs are connected to each other via these serial links and high-speed crossbar switches, overcoming the I/O bus bottleneck of conventional systems. By off-loading computation from expensive desktop processors, IDISK systems may improve cost-performance. More importantly, the IDISK architecture allows the processing of the system to scale with increasing storage demand.