As always, links were live upon publication.
- Storage Media and Technology
- Storage Companies in the News
- Industry Associations and Standards
- Webinars and Conferences
- Synology News
- Bonus Round
Storage Media and Technology
Carol Sliwa asked me to contribute to TechTarget’s 2020 Predictions, but due to some miscommunication my entry has been deleted from the article. No matter, I’ve decided to publish my own Predictions for 2020 in their entirety anyway. 🙂
How’s this for clickbait? Hard Disk is Dead! (But Only in Your Datacenter). Despite the hand waving, however, there are some really good points in the article – not surprising, since it’s written by Enrico Signoretti, one of the top storage analysts in the biz.
Speaking of predictions, David Vellante of Wikibon is offering his vision for storage in 2020. His take? Icebergs Ahead. There is a good reason to read through this, even if you don’t agree with Wikibon (and a few people don’t). Namely, Wikibon is one of the few organizations to wave the yellow flag on some of the trends in storage. Most of the predictions have been along the rather vacuous “more storage!” vein, but Vellante breaks down what that actually means and for whom. Agree or disagree, Wikibons is by far the most supported prediction I’ve seen this year.
Intel has released a Programming Persistent Memory ebook that describes how to design and optimize data structures for PM. Jim Handy goes into a bit of detail along with the links to the ebook.
How do SSDs Fail? This is a common question on Quora, for instance, but Jonmichael Hands has written an excellent blog for NVM Express on the subject that is well-worth a read.
Excited about those 12TB Seagate Drives? You may want to temper that enthusiasm, as they have a higher-than-typical MTBF rate. Here is Backblaze’s full report for their 2019 Hard Drive Stats. An interesting exercise for the reader is to compare that list with NewsDio’s list of the best hard drives for 2020.
Tom’s Hardware has a list of 2020’s best Portable and External SSDs.
Beware how the ripples intersect
Jai Menon, the Chief Scientist at Fungible (and IBM Fellow Emeritus, among other distinguished titles), wrote a really good article at Forbes for Scale-Out Storage for the Cloud World. The only thing that I have a beef about is the title – I don’t believe this is just for the “Cloud World;” that makes it sound like it’s someone else’s problem. Instead, all the conditions he’s listing are an issue for on-site data centers and technological growth. These are not cogs in the machine that we’re replacing, it’s pebbles causing ripples in the pond.
Storage Companies in the News
My good friends at NGD Systems raised $20M in Series C funding. In case you didn’t know, NGD is one of the primary leaders behind Computational Storage.
IBM folds Storwize into FlashSystems brand.
Samsung is releasing their NVMe-based Key-Value technology into the wild. If you’re a follower of storage, you’ll know that Key-Value work has been quite exciting as a topic, but has cooled in the past year or so. Samsung hopes to recapture some of that enthusiasm in 2020.
Well, this is interesting, and I’m not sure how I missed it. Intel and Micron are being sued over 3D XPoint.
A Federal Court of Appeals judge temporary blocked the Pentagon’s $10B cloud computing contract with Microsoft, giving AWS a temporary win.
Industry Associations and Standards
SCSI Trade Association
The SCSI Trade Association (STA) has announced its 2020 Board of Directors. My good friend Cameron Brett from Kioxia (ask your doctor!) has been elected the new President of the association. Major congrats are in order. Not only is he really really good at what he does, but he’s also a really nice guy (shhh… don’t tell anyone).
Webinars and Conferences
Here’s a short list of upcoming events. I am not currently scheduled for attending them, but who knows what might happen?
The USENIX FAST ’20 Conference on File and Storage technologies is February 24-27 in Santa Clara, CA. There is a lot of good content going on here, and you can see some presentations from past conferences as well.
OCP Global Summit. San Jose Convention Center, San Jose, CA. March 4-5, 2020. Of the upcoming events, this is the one that I wish I could go to, but once again life and fate have a way of getting in the way. The last few years have been a big deal with some major technical announcements.
Non-Volatile Memories Workshop. University of California, San Diego. March 8-10, 2020.
By the way, I kind of assumed everyone knew of this, but Stephen Foskett has a brilliant (and up to date!) tech event calendar that should be everyone’s go-to.
Flackbox is offering an Introduction to SAN and NAS Storage free course. The impressive thing here (I have not seen the course myself) is that he shows exactly what he’s going to do and breaks down the entire course right there on the page.
The Call for Papers for the 2020 Storage Developer Conference is now open.
If you are looking for information on the storage basics, you can check out SNIA’s “Geek Out On Storage Basics,” which I may have one or two things to do with…
Speaking of SNIA Webcasts, you may want to check out the next one on Object Storage: What, How and Why.
Also, I think this is going to be a good one to watch, too. Ethernet-attached SSDs—Brilliant Idea or Storage Silliness?
Synology News
Synology has opened up registration for their DSM 7.0 Preview Beta Program. They claim that they’ve completed most of the under-the-hood improvements, but are looking for assistance by users and 3rd party developers.
Please see earlier Storage Short Takes for additional Synology advisories. Some of those vulnerabilities are still active.
Bonus Round
Want NVMe-oF with TCP but don’t want to use that pesky SPDK stack? Well, now there’s a proposal for uNVMe-TCP.
Check out Chris Mellor’s Blocks & Files Storage Digest if you’re hungry for more news, too.
Comments
Pingback: Technology Short Take 125 - s0x