• Google Seeks Better Spinning Rust

    February 26, 2016

    It is like the world is turned on its head.

    What is the last place on earth where a massive number of disk drives will be unplugged? The hyperscalers who have convinced us to store massive amounts of data-laden content on their cloudy infrastructure. Where is the first place that will move completely to non-volatile media for primary storage? The enterprise.

    Those hyperscalers, the epitome of cutting edge technology, will be forced into using spinning rust for the foreseeable future – unless the volumes for disk drive shipments fall so low that the cost per gigabyte stagnates – precisely because …

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  • The Myth Of In-Memory Computing

    February 19, 2016 Bobby Johnson

    These days when you talk to people in the tech industry, you will get the idea that in-memory computing solves everything. The story is that RAM has become so cheap that you can just stuff all your data in-memory and you won’t have to worry about speed any more. But it is just a myth. Companies that buy into this myth will almost certainly regret that choice in the near future.

    Like most myths, there is a kernel of truth in this story. Keeping all data in-memory works brilliantly for some applications, but not all. RAM is cheaper than it …

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  • In A Decade, Disk Is Dead For Tier One Storage

    August 17, 2015

    The very first disk drive in the world was a vertical rotating drum coated with magnetic material called the IBM 305 RAMAC, which still used vacuum tubes as its compute elements and weighed about a ton. It was invented in 1956 and commercialized two years later, with IBM selling more than 1,000 of the units, which could store 5 million 8-bit characters and had an average seek time 600 milliseconds, not bad for a 1,200 RPM device.  Fast forward 70 years, and if the forecasts by the analysts at Wikibon prove true, then the venerable disk drive will finally …

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