This week Chris and Martin are joined by Chris Mellor for what is turning into an annual look at storage technology for the year ahead. We should point out that this is only for enterprise storage and not a forecast on the world in general!

We start with a discussion on media. At the macro level, capacities continue to grow for SSDs and HDDs year on year. This trend is expected to continue, but what micro-level advancements are being made?

QLC increases in layers, while PLC (penta-level cell) flash is being mooted as increasingly more practical. Hard drives are at 20TB and growing, but suffering the challenges of throughput. Will 2020 be the year we see multi-actuator take off?

Does old media continue into decline as the new tape? Could punched cards make a comeback? We think it’s unlikely.

The final part of the discussion turns to systems and composable systems in particular. Composability enables servers to be dynamically built from their constituent parts. The technology is in the early days and maybe not ready yet for mass adoption. Similarly, ARM processors look to be on the cusp of data centre relevance.

Part II of this recording will follow next week.

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Timeline

* 00:00:00 – Intros * 00:01:40 – Storage predictions only please! * 00:02:30 – Kioxia fire in the clean room * 00:04:00 – NAND prices will go up in 2020 * 00:05:15 – 128-layer flash on the way * 00:06:55 – Will PLC flat be “a thing”? * 00:10:40 – Enmotus have developed a hybrid SSD * 00:11:40 – 20TB+ hard drive capacity, what’s next? * 00:13:20 – Are hard drives the new tape? * 00:14:35 – Is the physical reliability of tape good or bad? * 00:16:55 – Has much happened in 12 months – 10 years? * 00:19:30 – Migration to SSDs wasn’t a big architectural change * 00:20:40 – Uh oh!  Gartner Hype Cycles! * 00:22:00 – Bring back punched cards! * 00:23:20 – What has happened with composable systems? * 00:26:34 – Liqid could be an interesting composable solution * 00:27:35 – Obligatory mainframe reference! * 00:30:00 – ARM servers could be popular in 10 years’ time. * 00:31:10 – Containerisation – moving from x86 to ARM * 00:34:05 – Is hyperscaler IT diverging from enterprise IT? * 00:37:40 – Wrap Up

Transcript

Related Podcasts & Blogs

* #136 – The End of the Year Show 2019* #82 – Storage Predictions for 2019* #37 – State of the Storage Union with Chris Mellor* Are ARM Processors Ready for Data Centre Primetime?* Liqid’s PCIe Fabric is the Key to Composable Infrastructure

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