Well maybe that overstates the case but there is no denying that both fatter (higher capacity) drives and flash memory (used as cache or in SSDs) saves energy in today’s data center.  The interesting thing is that the trend to higher capacity drives has been going on for decades now (see chart) but only within [...]

Intel-Micron Flash Technologies just issued another increase in NAND density. This one’s manages to put 8GB on a single chip with MLC(2) technology in a 167mm square package or roughly a half inch per side. You may recall that Intel-Micron Flash Technologies (IMFT) is a joint venture between Intel and Micron to develop NAND technology [...]

I saw a recent IEEE Spectrum article on engineering’s grand challenges for the next century and thought something similar should be done for data storage. So this is a start: Replace magnetic storage – most predictions show that magnetic disk storage has another 25 years and magnetic tape another decade after that before they run [...]

In a previous post I discussed what it would take to store 1YB of data in 2015 for the National Security Agency (NSA). Due to length, that post did not discuss many other aspects of the 1YB archive such as ingest, index, data protection, etc. Thus, I will attempt to cover each of these in [...]

Well, maybe an Exabyte a day was way too small for 2009. NSA is now reporting that they may be storing yottabytes (YB, 10**24) of data by 2015 somewhere in Utah. Later reports have NSA reducing this down to something closer to 1000 PB or so but YB of storage got me thinking. This points [...]

In my past life, I worked for a dominant tape vendor. Over the years, we had heard a number of times that tape was dead. But it never happened. BTW, it’s also not happening today. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was at SNW and vendor friend of mine asked if I knew anyone [...]

A older article that I recently came across said RAID 5 would be dead in 2009 by Robin Haris StorageMojo. In essence, it said as drives get to 1TB or more the time it took to rebuild the drive required going to RAID6. Another older article I came across said RAID is dead, all hail [...]

My recent post on an exabyte-a-day generated a comment that got me thinking. What we need in the world today is a universal deduped archive. Such an archive would be a repository for all information generated by the world, nation, state, etc. and would automatically deduplicate the data and back it up. Such an archive [...]