To users, storage is a utility; it should be boring. But it takes massive effort to get "boring utilities" to the point where they can be boring, and users can take it for granted that they will "just work." This talk traces the evolution of storage systems from 1970s supercomputers to modern, massively parallel designs, explaining how the need for checkpointing in high-performance computing led to the development of parallel file systems like Lustre in the late 1990s. corwin, uber tech lead for parallel file systems at Google, covers the challenges of bringing parallel file systems to cloud environments, and discusses how Google makes high performance storage appear simple, fast, and scalable.
