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An Anonymous Coward writes:

The Register's Chris Mellor interviewed Robert Novak [theregister.co.uk], who most recently spent 8 years at Sun Microsystems, worked as Director of Enterprise Systems at Supermicro from July 2007 to April 2012, then moved to Nexenta as Director of Systems Architecture at Nexenta until December 2014, then was at HP "until recently", where he is now "searching for funding for a startup he's been working on since July, and has filed two patents for some new ways of managing object storage."

And what sensational clickbait does Mellor use to start the interview? "Why is block storage dead?" Novak then proceeds to compare block storage to Hollerith punch cards, and concludes with "That is why I contend that the 'block' storage that we use for computers is 125 years old." He then gushes about the Seagate Kinetic drive, complete with "No tickee, no laundry" analogies, and then somehow asserts that "object storage can actually outperform block storage" with lossy recollections of the history of hard disk drives, and claims that a "bit-torrent effect" can be achieved with object storage. He then proceeds to belittle backups as unnecessary, and gushes about "Ethernet-attached storage devices that use stateless UDP access."

I'm not candy-coating this: the interview is garbage, the "block storage is dead" viewpoint is ridiculous, and no concrete supporting evidence was brought to the interview, though I do feel that the interview itself is a window into the fanaticism of tech startup entrepreneurs attempting to push and shove their way into the marketplace, regardless of how ridiculous their claims may be. I felt that there were far more statements grounded in fact in the comments section, such as, "A key problem with Kinetic [drives] is the CPU overhead on the client side. Let's assume I access many drives or flash: it would eat up all my CPU, versus a SAS HBA or NVMe, which do 6 GB/s all in hardware." Or this one: "Oh, and accessing storage congests networks. Blindly using UDP is fatally flawed in nontrivial installations. Layering one of the emerging congestion control protocols over UDP is fine. But I predict that [in] 100 years we will still have physical devices which store linear arrays of bytes, and within them we will store smaller linear arrays of bytes. If block storage is dead, long live block storage II!"

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