Storage and CE Devices – Storage Visions 2011

 January 5, 2011, Storage Visions, Las Vegas — digital storage is becoming crucial to product design in consumer electronics. The panel comprised of moderator Guy Finley from Media and Entertainment Services Alliance, Dave Reinsel from IDC, Ho Seong Lee from Samsung Electronics, Tony Kim from Samsung Semiconductor, Kishore Rao from Intel, Robert Pierce from Cadence (flash division, formerly Denali), and Robert Griswold from Western Digital.

Reinsel commented that there is a rise in mobility and in data hungry businesses, so what’s in it for storage? The main driver for new storage applications is consumption, which drives traffic e-commerce and social networks. There is increasing mobility between phones and PCs and increasingly consumers are looking for personal services.

As a result, storage is being driven by three C’s: content, cloud, and context. Content creation does not equate to increase storage nor to increased value. About 80% of new content is rich media, things like videos and surveillance footage. These media are causing the number of files to increase exponentially, and by 2020 total online storage is expected to exceed 35 zeta bites.

Cloud storage enables people to access their data where ever and whenever they want to, so the questions would be, why would you store things in the cloud and what are the capacity limits? The context of all these data pieces is something that’s going to need better tools for management. People need help ingesting their information & then binding the information to its metadata. The proliferation of sensors and online applications is causing metadata to become the fastest-growing subset of all categories of data storage.

Businesses need to manage the metadata as closely as they do their other intellectual property. In a recent survey, 40% of respondents said a service outage of an hour or more would damage their business. 30% of the respondents also considered security to be an important issue in this percentage is expected to grow to greater than that of all businesses by 2020. As a result, there are many opportunities in consumer facing applications and services for increased efficiency in data management, security, and privacy.

Leigh mentioned that the mass storage needs of consumer products is increasing dramatically. One example is an intelligent karaoke system which includes Internet connectivity and storage. Other examples include digital cinema, surveillance systems, and intelligent toll collections. On top of these, are the seemingly endless blocks of information on the web driven by smart phones, tablets, and connected televisions.

Consumers are pulled in two directions. In the case of digital, not in my backyard (NIMBY) methods drive the most undesired uses of data, and consumed lots of storage. In contrast, please in my backyard (PIMBY) consists of applications but also consume large amounts of storage. When asked, consumers say they don’t want to see any ads, but when they are looking for something specific, they welcome the ads.

These drivers will cause changes in storage devices and more functions per type of storage. Storage devices must improve the reliability, costs, capacities, and other features depending on the application. The largest overall driver for capacity in HDD is the Web. Hard drives are containers for flash media, games, and video, in both distributed and surveillance forms.

HDD are dominant in two segments of the business, distributed and centralized storage. Data volumes are increasing exponentially and everyone is looking for cheaper storage media to enable their applications. The next generation of computing will be consumer electronics connected to the web. The convergence of tablets, TV, and phones is driving the need for more storage both local and connected.

Kim opined that flash memory is now being segmented by application, so product size, speed, and architecture are optimized for some function. The drivers for all of this are cost, reliability, and performance which is usually considered as read/write and either sequential or random access. Form-factor is also important. In the enterprise, users want a plug-in replacement with power-off recovery capabilities.

Technology will be getting a breakpoint in ’13 or ’14 if the products continue to double density every year. One challenge is that reliability is decreasing as performance and capacity continue to increase. To maintain my reliability at acceptable levels with 3000 write cycles requires improvements and changes in the controllers. In addition, the error correcting codes need to be improved and also integrated into the controllers.

One alternative to raw flash is managed NAND in the form of eMMC or eSSD. These products are host free and provide error-free management in the host. eMMC is easy to adopt the use and convert and will soon be covered by a JEDEC standard as eSATA. The standard will use the SCSI command layer and an mPHY physical connection. These evolutionary changes demonstrate the importance of innovation in addressing the issues of cost, reliability, and performance in solid-state storage devices.

Rao talked about instant, affordable SSDs. The promise of SSD storage is that this technology might be able to keep up with the advances in CPUs and is gaining acceptance in the marketplace. As many as 1 percent of all new drives are SSDs. The main reasons for picking SSDs are performance, lower power consumption, ruggedness, reliability, and total cost of ownership is lower than HDDs.

New products like tablets and smart phones need fairly large volumes of storage but don’t have the space or power for rotating media. Not only can SSDs compete in price, performance, and ruggedness, but by changing the form factor, can fit easily into the design of tablets and phones. These applications are systems-level platforms plus software and comprise a whole ecosystem.

The latest metrics are showing that reliability is dropping in the higher density storage devices. Therefore it is important to consider all levels of reliability; cell, flash, and PC or system to understand what is going on in the storage devices. The need for better NAND management is growing and at the same time manufacturers must try to optimize density, price, and reliability at the same time.

Pierce mentioned that non-volatile memory is at an inflection point. New markets are all mobile—tablets, netbooks, phones, ebooks—and all of them need more storage. The growing media issue is that power, latency, and form-factor are critical issues and the advances in batteries are not keeping up with the device power needs.

One sticking point in comparing technologies is the cost per bit of storage. Multi-level cells have good cost/bit, density, and speed characteristics, but are showing lower bit-cell reliability and have slower erase and write cycles. These characteristics are driving increases in firmware and chip complexity to try to manage the competing issues.

In the server markets, one issue is boundary alignments. Partial sector addressing and writing help. To address the reliability issues, the error correcting codes are changing as well as increasing the detect and correct capabilities to 121 bits. A lot of the performance and reliability depends upon the controller quality, and the controller pricing generally tracks overall quality. The performance of the industry is showing traces of maturity as common interfaces and protocols become standardized.

Some of the issues and problems in SSDs are in the host interface. SATA or SAS only has the capacity for 32 commands, while flash handle 128. In cell phones, the memory capacity for the radio and DSP functions requires a shadow memory to add capacity to the storage array. The existing solutions are limiting the media and user experience. Moving to a cloud storage solution just brings up the problems of access and connectivity. Probably what is needed to solve the interface problems is a change to the hardware and software architectures. The sweet spot for capacity is at the high end for HDDs and at the low end for SSD and flash-based systems.

Griswold observed that the OS manufacturers are driving the requirements for performance and size. SSDs can fill all of the other needs for a system. The industry is working with Microsoft and others to keep the drive capacities and performance in s to keep the drive capacities and performance in sync with the OS changes.