This week, Chris and Martin chat to Phil Bullinger, Senior VP and General Manager for the Data Centre Business Unit at Western Digital. As storage media capacities increase, recording methods are introducing challenges to maintaining resiliency and performance. SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) and ZNS (Zoned Namespaces) are two techniques that have developed to address the scaling issues in modern media devices.

SMR is a technique for hard drives that overlays the recording area of tracks on storage media to gain increased areal density. This results in a requirement to re-write entire blocks or zones of disk that could be tens of megabytes in size.

ZNS divides solid-state media into zones to improve I/O performance and increase device endurance. This is achieved through reduction in write amplification and reduced garbage collection.

With both media, the recording techniques continue to help reduce the cost of devices and maintain the downward trend of $/GB for modern media. This discussion introduces us to the benefits and some of the challenges. If you want to learn more, Western Digital sponsors an independent website at http://zonedstorage.io/.

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Timeline

* 00:00:00 – Intros * 00:02:00 – What are today’s storage & data challenges? * 00:04:20 – HDDs & SSDs continue to grow in capacity but have challenges * 00:06:40 – I/O density represents a big problem for today’s media * 00:09:00 – What is zoned storage? * 00:12:41 – HDD media grains are driving new ways of reading/writing * 00:14:00 – SMR overmap * 00:16:50 – Zoned storage is designed for sequential workloads * 00:19:05 – What is ZNS – Zoned Namespaces? * 00:21:00 – SSDs try to emulate hard drives * 00:23:40 – ZNS can simplify the operation of reads and writes * 00:26:00 – ZNS can make SSD performance more deterministic * 00:28:40 – SMR has drive managed, host managed or host aware * 00:32:00 – Data centre builds are al about TCO, including storage * 00:34:34 – Will SDS see greater benefits from zoned storage? * 00:38:50 – Most data is written once and never amended * 00:42:00 – ZNS will improve the endurance of QLC * 00:43:00 – Wrap Up

Related Podcasts & Blogs

* #113 – The Expanding Storage Hierarchy* #55 – Storage for Hyperscalers* #161 – Seagate MACH.2 Dual Actuator Drive Deep Dive* Managing Massive Media

Phil’s Bio

Phil

Bullinger is Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Data Center Business

Unit for Western Digital where he focuses on accelerating the growth and

performance of the company’s broad portfolio of data center disk and flash

products.  

Previously,

Bullinger was Senior Vice President and General Manager at Dell EMC, where he

was responsible for the Isilon product line, including product planning,

hardware and software engineering, production operations and customer support.

He also held executive positions at Oracle as their Senior Vice President of

SAN/NAS Storage, and at LSI as the Executive Vice President and General Manager

for the Engenio Storage Group.

Bullinger’s