Survey of the storage evolution

The storage market is in a state of transition on several fronts. This seems to be a time where noteworthy technologies are evolving that will have long-term impacts on information technology and high performance computing (HPC). Two of the more important evolutions in the storage arena are the serialization of storage access mechanisms, and efforts to access storage via IP networks. While these two efforts are not necessarily related, they are both seen by many storage vendors as defining trends in the industry. We focus on these two IO bus level evolutionary trends in particular, and how we can expect them to affect HPC users.