Introduction to Tectonic

Storage systems—specialization vs. generality

Over the years, organizations have built large distributed storage systems to meet their evolving needs. Such systems are often optimized for specific use cases and might not be a good fit for a general storage workload. The operational complexity of evolving and maintaining many storage systems takes its toll in terms of monetary cost and potential duplicate work. As operational experience with specialized systems builds, system designers often get new insights on how they could use a single generalized system to meet the needs of many use cases.

Note: In system design, we often start with a specialized system that is optimized for a specific use case. Over time it might be possible to consolidate many such specialized systems into one general system, until we get some new use case that a general system is not able to meet. The design activity acts like a pendulum between specialized and general systems over here.