August 13, 2013, Flash Memory Summit, Santa Clara, CA—Jason Taylor from Facebook described the structural and architectural implications of flash in the datacenter. Although bulk store is still in HDDs, newer use modes are making flash viable in longer term storage. Facebook has five main regional server centers and serves 84 percent of its members…
August 14, 2013, Flash Memory Summit, Santa Clara, CA—Swapna Yasarapu from STEC moderated a panel on SSD use cases and implementation. Panel members were George Crump from Storage Switzerland, Bruce Moxon from STEC, and Sean Stead from STEC. Stead provided an overview of flash in storage, including platforms and form factors, as well as the…
July 18, 2013, Micron Technology released some details of their latest 16 nm flash chips. These 128Gb MLC NAND Flash memory devices are targeted at applications like consumer SSDs, removable storage (USB drives and Flash cards), tablets, ultrathin devices, mobile handsets and data center cloud storage. The new 128Gb NAND Flash memory provides the greatest…
June 18, 2013, Entertainment Technology in the Internet Age, SPMTE and SCIEN conference, Stanford, CA—A panel took on the topic of HTML 5 and Canvas for the interactive Internet. The program chair and moderator was Jan Skoglund from Google. Speakers included Hugh Finnan from Google, Jet Villegas from Mozilla, and Dirk Schulze from Adobe. Schulze…
May 14, 2013, Uptime Institute Symposium, Santa Clara, CA—Andy Lawrence from 451 Research evaluated trends and drivers to consider which ones will be significant over the next 5-20 years. The difficulty is taking such a long-term focus is that the technologies can change very dramatically even within the lower-end of the range. To demonstrate this…
February 5, 2013 – At the Linley Data Center Conference held in San Jose earlier this month, we had a chance to meeting the Ryan Baxter of Micron to discuss their new NVDIMM module that is targeted at enterprise servers. To bring higher reliability to the enterprise marketplace, the NVDIMM product looks like an RDIMM…
January 29, 2013, SNIA Non-Volatile Memory Summit, Santa Clara, CA—Kaladhar Voruganti from NetApp highlighted the trends and impacts of new architectures in memory structures and what standards are needed to make the adoption proceed. Network storage now has many options in NAS and DAS, and the key parameters are IOPS and capacity. To improve performance,…
January 29, 2013, SNIA Non-Volatile Memory Summit, Santa Clara, CA—Robin Harris from TechnoQWAN and StorageMojo provided an overview of the NVM industry. He reviewed the emerging technologies, products, and markets. Trends for the future have to consider the historical perspectives as new technologies displace older ones. Over time, all technologies the industry sees increasing adoption…
November 27, 2012, Server Design Summit, Santa Clara, CA—Andy Walls from IBM talked about server-storage problems and how the many different forms of data are making the problems worse. The information explosion is overtaking the whole industry. We are generating over 2.5 exabytes a day and 90 percent of all data has been created in…
November 2012 – In a briefing with Spansion, we discussed the release of the industries first 8Gb NOR flash, that has been built on a 45nm process. The part – the Spansion GL-T is a retrofit compliant memory for standard parallel interface NOR Flash of lower densities. The parts are sampling in 2012 and will…