Recent press reports about a bidding war for 3PAR bring into focus the expanding need for enterprise class data storage subsystems.  What exactly is enterprise storage? Defining enterprise storage is frought with problems but I will take a shot.  Enterprise class data storage has: Enhanced reliability, high availability and serviceability – meaning it hardly ever [...]

Western Digital (WD) announced their first SSD drive for the desktop/laptop market space today.  Their drive offers the typical256, 128, and 64GB capacity points over a SATA interface.  Performance looks ok at 5K random read or write IO/s with sustained transfers at 250 and 140MB/s for read and write respectively.  But what caught my eye [...]

Yesterday, twitterland was buzzing about EMC’s latest enhancement to their Atmos Cloud Storage platform called GeoProtect.  This new capability improves cloud data protection by supporting erasure code data protection rather than just pure object replication. Erasure coding has been used for over a decade in storage and some of the common algorithms are Reed-Solomon, Cauchy [...]

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 [...]

Today Toshiba announced a new series of SSD drives based on their 32NM MLC NAND technology. The new technology is interesting but what caught my eye was another part of their website, i.e., their SSD FAQs. We have talked about MLC NAND technology before and have discussed its inherent reliability limitations, but this is the [...]

Today Seagate announced their new SSD offering, named the Pulsar SSD.  It uses SLC NAND technology and comes in a 2.5″ form factor at 50, 100 or 200GB capacity.  The fact that it uses a 3GB/s SATA interface seems to indicate that Seagate is going after the server market rather than the highend storage market [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]