> IBM could have 90% of the home computer and server market if they didn't charge so much for their stuff. They always had the best technology.
In this particular case, there is no contemporary technological advantage of ECKD over standard hard disks/SSDs - it is simply a matter of legacy backward compatibility, lock-in, and an attempt to financially sustain the mainframe storage ecosystem. The idea of variable sector sizes may have had some real advantages when it was invented back in the 1960s, but nowadays it is just adding unnecessary complexity for no real benefit.
Even the idea of having the hard disk do key searches is something IBM has been moving away from, because doing them in software on the CPU turned out to be much faster in practice. It is still required because the primary traditional mainframe filesystem (VTOC) is based on it, but in areas where performance is critical (such as databases) IBM now positions it as a legacy technology.
Maybe there's still some value in moving key searches into the storage layer, but if there is, it would have to be something much more advanced than the rather simplistic 1960s implementation that ECKD storage provides. Oracle came up with a conceptually similar idea much more recently, Oracle Exadata (released 2008), in which some aspects of database query execution are delegated to the storage–especially table scans. ECKD only supports very basic comparison operations on the key field; Exadata, from what I understand (I used to work for Oracle, but not in this area) can evaluate complex predicates over the whole database row.
I worked for a state government that was in the process of migrating hundreds of Oracle DBs from VMWare VMs to Exadata servers. I think combined they had over 20TBs of RAM. I asked one of the DBAs about how much better performance was and he said he typically saw at least a 10x increase in QPS and reduction in latency.
Samsung has a SmartSSD with a FPGA on it to offload compute to the drives.
In this particular case, there is no contemporary technological advantage of ECKD over standard hard disks/SSDs - it is simply a matter of legacy backward compatibility, lock-in, and an attempt to financially sustain the mainframe storage ecosystem. The idea of variable sector sizes may have had some real advantages when it was invented back in the 1960s, but nowadays it is just adding unnecessary complexity for no real benefit.
Even the idea of having the hard disk do key searches is something IBM has been moving away from, because doing them in software on the CPU turned out to be much faster in practice. It is still required because the primary traditional mainframe filesystem (VTOC) is based on it, but in areas where performance is critical (such as databases) IBM now positions it as a legacy technology.
Maybe there's still some value in moving key searches into the storage layer, but if there is, it would have to be something much more advanced than the rather simplistic 1960s implementation that ECKD storage provides. Oracle came up with a conceptually similar idea much more recently, Oracle Exadata (released 2008), in which some aspects of database query execution are delegated to the storage–especially table scans. ECKD only supports very basic comparison operations on the key field; Exadata, from what I understand (I used to work for Oracle, but not in this area) can evaluate complex predicates over the whole database row.