Storage Short Take #56

Happy Hannukah! Merry Christmas! Happy Kwanza! Fabulous Festivus!

(Whatever works for you.)

This is the last SST of the year, and like we've come to expect there are several last-minute news and updates - as well as the usual "predictions."

All in all, it's a rather busy short take this time around (with loads to get you through the "long" holiday break).

As always links were live when published.

And have a happy (and safe) New Year!

In the UK, Aston University is trying to "tackle the global shortage of digital data storage." They're concerned that data storage is going to consume too much electricity, and are trying to come up with better manufacturing processes to reduce that footprint. Admirable, to be sure, but I think the lead researcher may be ignoring Parkinson's Law. In this case, it might be Metz' Law: "Storage Expands To Fill The Electricity Allotted."

Yikes. Acronis published a report that shows the average cost of Data Breaches is expected to go beyond $5M per incident in 2023.

Solidigm is planning on releasing 30TB and 61TB SSDs based on 192-layer QLC. The big hurdle they have to get over is the durability of QLC, but they have presented data that it'll be just fine. We'll have to see what happens when an independent lab starts to do some testing.

Back when I was a Masters student, I found that I needed more storage. Being extremely poor, I actually had to take out a loan from the Bank of Dad for my first ever external hard drive - a 540MB (that's not a typo) for $1100. That was considerably earlier than BackBlaze's countdown, though, which really just makes me marvel at how far technology has come.

What's the difference between "Data Backup" and "Data Protection?" If you ask me, marketing.

Have you backed up your car yet? Tesla is rolling out a $350 1TB external hard drive (because of course, why wouldn't it be 5-7x the cost of a regular drive?). How much you wanna bet that you need to license the data that your own car generates and ask permission from Tesla to access it?

Are you ready for the 2023 predictions? Who's gonna bet that the #1 'prediction' is that there's going to be more data than ever? No? No takers?

• Tom Coughlin's Part 1
• InsideBigData's 2023 Storage Market Trends predictions
• Enterprise Storage Forum's 2023 hardware predictions.
• Don't forget ESF's 2023 Software predictions, too.
• Scality's press release - I mean, 2023 storage predictions are so shocking, #4 will surprise you! (no, no it won't).
• Datanami has assembled a who's who list of startup storage companies that I've never heard of to give their take on 2023.
• Spiceworks' predictions lead off with... companies need to counteract economic uncertainty. No, I'm not making that up.
• Dataversity looked like it had a promising title to discuss unstructured data, but oh look - first item: Data will grow. Then comes the word-salad.
• At least betanews came up with a new term: "cyber vaulting" in their 2023 prediction list. Would have been nice if they actually explained how it was supposed to work (the exercise is left up to the reader).
• I give Michel Tricot, CEO of Airbyte, of actually giving some thought to the exercise. His entire article is about ELT (Extract, Load, and Transform) operations for data integration, but it would have been nice if he had actually defined it somewhere in his article. Nevertheless, it's one of the better prediction articles so far.
• Some VMware folks offer up some ideas of what's going to happen in the government sector.
• My good friend Rick Vanover from Veeam wrote an article on Cloud and Data protection, but I confess I'm a bit disappointed that it didn't have more teeth than just "you need to protect yourself better."
• Sometimes these predictions are just simply funny as hell. You sometimes get a "<NextYear> will be the year of <OurStuff>." This article on the "Year of RDI™" (trademarked by the author, of course) is perhaps the textbook example.
• Fintechnews is the first set of predictions to talk about "small data," aside from the usual trite clichés.
• Continuity Central has a solid list, albeit nothing earth-shattering. Security, "Green", and "Cloud" top the list. Perhaps the most interesting part of their predictions is that Open Source solutions are going to be specifically attacked by malicious software bad actors.
• Komprise has written a blog about their predictions, but perhaps the most interesting one is that there will be a changing of roles as storage architects and engineers move to take on data services while junior engineers will backfill.
• Finally! Someone willing to take a chance and make a bold statement! Zscaler comes rights out and says that on-site data protection is going away. Customers will find their data to be better protected in the Cloud. Do I agree? No. But I applaud their grab-the-topic-by-the-balls approach.
• In contrast, Datayard's 2023 predictions are... zzzzzzzz. Oh, what was I saying?
• I find this one extremely disturbing. According to the Director of Data Ethics Practice, of SAS writes, "It’s widely understood and agreed upon that AI can be biased. In 2023, the industry will extend our beliefs to accept that biases are in us and around us; they are central to our humanness and influence how we make decisions. Developing AI that predicts and mitigates harmful biases is the first step to securing the necessary trust to move forward without replicating past mistakes." Except... biases are one of the least understood aspects of human psychology, and even more poorly predicted. Hilarity will ensue.

And, lest you think that I'm not willing to put my money where my mouth is, I've stuck my own neck out to make predictions for 2023 as well.

The first bit of news has to be Fungible's acquisition by Microsoft. Blocks & Files reports that the company went for $190M, which is considerably less than the $300M they received in funding.

GRAID (I can never tell if it's supposed to be all-caps or not) and Liqid) have announced a project to provide "accelerated Data Protection for the World's Fastest NVMe Flash." This Data Protection claim is something that really needs to be put through it's paces, if Level1Techs' Review is to be believed.

Shot. Chaser.

Start your patent engines, folks. NGX Storage (so hard not to write "NGD") is looking to go head-to-head with VAST Data with their scale-out NVMe Block storage array.

Synology has released an advisory (ongoing) with respect to Samba Active Directory as well as PWN2OWN TORONTO. While there is no remedy for the former, you should update to 7.11-42962-3 to address the latter.

Micron looks like it'll be another in a long line of tech companies laying off employees.

Who are the best vendors for cloud, enterprise and high-performance file storage? Coldago Research has thoughts.

SNIA announced its new leadership for 2022-2023.

Chris Mellor from Blocks & Files makes a strong argument for improved inclusion of Cloud Storage from it's Energy Efficiency program, Emerald.™

NVM Express has an article (written by my good friend Fred Knight) about the updates to the NVMe™ 2.0 specification, with support for Fabrics and Multi-Domain Subsystems. It's a short-and-sweet article that covers the new developments.

A new storage alliance has just been formed, called the Decentralized Storage Alliance. My own company (AMD) is apparently involved, though I confess this came as news to me. Looks like I have some catching up to do.

Jim Handy has a few thoughts on the "unprecedented collapse" of the memory market.

A good friend of mine, Matt Leib, has joined the Greybeards on Storage podcast to talk about data orchestration for RedHat OpenShift Environments.

If you're big into storage security and encryption, you may be interested in the SNIA Storage Developer Podcast on Key per I/O - Fine Grain Encryption for Storage.

If you're going to be going to MemCon (at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA), you can enjoy a 15% discount on registration (courtesy of SNIA) with the code SNIA15. It's hard to believe that there may be people who live in Silicon Valley and haven't been to CHM, but if you haven't you really, really need to go. It's very cool.

What do pizzas and storage have in common? ArchitectingIT has some ideas.

This is a great blog written by Joel Granados on write amplification (WAF) on a given fio workload. It includes some pretty nifty tips for measuring bytes written at the device level, which can be used to calculate WAF.

You can check out some really cool interviews with SNIA storage experts. Well, two experts... and me. If you haven't heard about SDXI or Swordfish, for instance, you certainly will be. These are some good DTE discussions that are a good starting point.

You may have seen Monty Python do this sketch, but most people don't know that it originated on At Last the 1948 Show. May I present, The Four Yorkshiremen.