Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (ML/AI) are two of the biggest buzzwords in the tech industry at the moment. The technologies have wide application, much greater than the often-repeated stories about self-driving cars. ML/AI solutions can be used in healthcare to improve diagnostics. It has applications across the financial world, allowing companies to be more… Read more »
The rate of growth in flash media is truly incredible. In ten years, we’ve gone from highly expensive SLC devices to a range of NAND flash media for all requirements. Flash manufacturers continue to push the boundaries, with 30TB and 100TB drives already on the market. With no end to this growth in sight, how… Read more »
We’re probably all familiar with the concept of the HDD or SSD reliability bathtub curve (figure 1). This shows how over the lifetime of a drive, failures typically follow a pattern where failure rate increases over time to a steady state, then increases again as the device wears out. But have you considered the idea… Read more »
For the past 20 years, Fibre Channel has been the dominant enterprise data centre storage networking technology. By this, I mean traditional Fibre Channel, not variants that work over IP or use Converged Ethernet (more on that in a moment). It’s true that other protocols exist. Smaller organisations have typically used iSCSI, because of the… Read more »
We are living in a golden age of storage media, where new products come to market offering ever greater performance with lower latency than previous generations. Today the hard drive and even early flash drives look positively archaic compared to modern NVMe drives built from 3D-XPoint, capable of delivering hundreds of thousands of IOPS and… Read more »
The next greatest thing in storage hardware is the move to NVMe. This is occurring in two ways – conversion of internal designs within shared storage platforms to use NVMe at the “back-end”, and front-end (or host connectivity) using NVMe over Fabrics in some form. Vendors are starting to use the term “end-to-end” NVMe as… Read more »
To date we’ve only seen QLC NAND storage in the consumer SD card format, however, that’s set to change as Micron announces the first QLC SATA SSD for the data centre. The Micron 5210 ION SSD will deliver up to 7.68TB of capacity in a standard 2.5″, 7mm form factor. But there’s a catch –… Read more »
Last week Dell EMC announced the next generation of the long-running Symmetrix platform with the release of PowerMax. This all-NVMe array apparently isn’t a replacement for VMAX (or XtremIO). However it is yet another decision point in customer choice for all-flash from Dell EMC. Does the company need another all-flash array or is this just… Read more »
It’s been only a month since I wrote about Samsung’s 30TB solid state disk and already the bar has been set higher. This week Nimbus Data announced a 100TB 3.5″ SSD (the DC100) that blows past the proof of concept 60TB drive demonstrated by Seagate only a few years ago. How real is 100TB in… Read more »
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