Roy Pedlar
The new ICL 2900 CAFS ?
The ICL 2900 systems used CAFS (Content Addressable File Store), which was years ahead of it's time, which pre-selected data from disc rather than obtaining all of the data and then using the main CPU (OCP) to select in detail
The photo above is of a Sun Oracle ExaData server in 2008 which uses the same principle, albeit executing SQL directly on the disc units (instead of using the main CPUs) on a relational database nowadays, to achieve the selection required. A mix of solid state disc is used as well as the spinning variety also now.
The new ICL 2900 CAFS ?
The ICL 2900 systems used CAFS (Content Addressable File Store), which was years ahead of it's time, which pre-selected data from disc rather than obtaining all of the data and then using the main CPU (OCP) to select in detail
The photo above is of a Sun Oracle ExaData server in 2008 which uses the same principle, albeit executing SQL directly on the disc units (instead of using the main CPUs) on a relational database nowadays, to achieve the selection required. A mix of solid state disc is used as well as the spinning variety also now.