It's been a while since I've sent out a Storage Short Take. It's not by design - the last few weeks have been pedal-to-the-metal.
I finally have a brief moment to try to get back on track, so I'll try to put in some quick-and-dirty links. Less commentary than usual, though.
As always, links were valid at the time of publication.
Storage Media and Technology
One of the big advantages that HDDs have over SSDs has been capacity. But with PLC (Penta-Level Cell) technology around the corner, that advantage may be slipping. The real question, though, is about the reliability of that kind of storage. In storage, cramming memory cells together is not really a 'good' thing for long-term reliability.
To me, this is pretty damn cool-sounding. Page-state aware caching for improving 3D NAND performance. My biggest beef with it is that I didn't think of it.
Tom's Guide has listed their picks for the best external hard drives in 2023 (so far).
My friend Jonmichael Hands did an interview with the BBC about the Circular Drive Initiative (CDI), which is promoting the secure re-use of storage hardware. Thanks to recent developments in drive sanitization (including for NVMe) it's now a usable option instead of destroying perfectly good hardware.
Tape is dead, or so they said. Looks like they're redefining every word they can think of, including "dead." (Spoiler: it's not "dead.")
Storage Companies in the News
Liqid wins a $32M contract to deliver the "World's Largest Composable Supercomputer" for the US DoD. The press release doesn't go into detail about just how composable it will be, but I've always been impressed by their technology. I honestly didn't know that it had this kind of scale. Good for them.
Gartner has released its Voice of the Customer rank of storage vendors. Do with it as you will.
Kyodo News has more details about the possible merger between Kioxia and Western Digital.
Speaking of Kioxia, they've begun operation of two new R&D facilities in Japan.
Synology has released DiskStation Manager 7.2, which includes Immutable Storage and Full-Volume Encryption. This is definitely something I need to look into more, as I'm trying to find 2 seconds to rub together to have my backup targets in a mixed environment with TrueNAS.
Riverbed, once a monster presence in the remote data I/O access space, has just been sold. I confess, I haven't heard much - if anything - about them lately. But with this word-salad of a current description, I'm not really surprised: "Riverbed has helped the world’s largest organizations... empower the digital experience and drive enterprise performance."
StorageReview's Weekly Summary is out, and discusses reviews of some pretty interesting updates, including a "Seagate & Star Wars Lightsaber SSD storage" review.
Project Endless Memory, by MemVerge and SKhynix.
Industry Associations and Standards
Webinars, Blogs, and Conferences
A few years back I sat in a fascinating discussion at the former Intel Developer Forum conference where they were talking about silent errors in silicon, and how it affected both chips and storage devices. OCP is now picking up that mantle and having a webinar on May 8, 2023 to discuss the effect and how it affects the users' trust in the system, best practices, and how to deal with it.
Persistent Memory, CXL & Memory Tiering - Past, Present & Future. Tuesday, June 27, 2023. This webinar featuring panelists from Intel, Samsung, and VMware will discuss Persistent Memory, Compute Express Link™ (CXL™), and Memory Tiering; and how the ecosystem is working together to provide solutions for memory tiering using CXL for customer use cases.
Data Fabric: Connecting the Dots between Structured and Unstructured Data
Wednesday, June 28, 2023. Data Fabric is an architecture, set of services and platform that standardizes and integrates data across the enterprise regardless of data location (On-Prem, Cloud, Multi-Cloud, Hybrid Cloud), enabling self-service data access to support various applications, analytics, and use cases. The data fabric leaves data where it lives and applies intelligent automation to govern, secure and bring AI to your data.
NVMe/TCP: Performance, Deployment and Automation
Wednesday, July 19, 2023, Since its ratification in late 2018, NVMe/TCP has gained a lot of attention due to its great performance characteristics and relatively low cost. Since then, the NVMe/TCP protocol has been enhanced to add features such as Discovery Automation, Authentication and Secure Channels that make it more suitable for use in enterprise environments.
128GFC: A Preview of the New Fibre Channel Speed. 128GFC is the latest and fastest Fibre Channel speed. Recently ratified by the T11 Fibre Channel standards committee, this new speed takes Fibre Channel further into the future! On June 21, 2023, the FCIA will host a live webcast, “128GFC: A Preview of the New Fibre Channel Speed.”
Bonus Round
Don't know about you, but I think we could all use a laugh. Coincidentally, Bob Newhart is a national treasure. His humor isn't for everyone, but he is definitely unique and his style and delivery is one-of-a-kind.