The best emerging storage tech of 2017

My consulting focuses on #emergingtechnology, especially in #datastorage. Storage is taking a larger and larger piece of the IT budget, and with the growth of #IoT, #BigData, and #AI, that trend will only continue. That's why we need new technologies to improve our not-terribly-resilient storage infrastructure. FLASH While flash is not new, the advent of quad-level cells ( #QLC) - four bits per cell - and the widespread adoption of #3Dflash, is. The two generally go hand in hand, since QLC needs larger cell sizes, which 3D flash makes economical. It will take several years for both technologies to reach full maturity, but together they show how promising the future is for flash.

STORAGE CLASS MEMORY

SCM is byte-addressable memory that persists data after the power is turned off, so it can be used for storage. Intel finally shipped some of its much hyped 3D XPoint this year, but only as a block addressable storage and not as byte addressable memory.

But Intel and Micron are not the only players. Everspin has increased its MRAM part density to 1 gigabit - still well below what flash offers - but enough to attract many new users, given MRAM's high performance, ruggedness, and density.

Also in the running are Adesto, Crossbar, and Nantero. Expect to see significant announcements from these in 2018.

PCIE STORAGE NETWORKS

One company, Liqid has taken a commercially available PCIe switch chip to create a rack-mountable PCIe switch. Why is this cool? Basically it allows you to extend a server's PCIe bus outside the box, with all the bandwidth and low latency that comes with PCIe.

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Liqid is a software company whose main product allows you to create virtual servers out of PCIe connected physical servers. The idea is build high-density racks of computes, networks and storage and use software to create virtual servers that have whatever the application needs for optimum performance.

I expect this concept to catch fire in 2018. Every server has PCIe, why not use it as an interconnect? Which, by the way, was the original concept for PCI years ago.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/the-best-emerging-storage-tech-of-2017/