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. …
Flash memory has proven to be the most disruptive storage technology of the past few years. …
Flash memory is cheap, but it isn’t fast, at least not by the standards of DRAM. …
There are almost too many ways to skin the storage cat in the enterprise datacenter these days. …
All-flash array upstart Pure Storage has had a single target it has been aiming at since the company uncloaked from stealth mode back in the summer of 2011: Tier one disk storage in the datacenter. …
If space, power consumption, and raw I/O performance were not an issue, most datacenters would continue to use disk drives for their tier one storage until the end of time. …
Around this time last year, EMC announced the acquisition of DSSD, a storage acceleration startup founded by a slew of ex-Sun leads, including Andy Bechtolsheim (one of the original Sun founders), Jeff Bonwick (co-creator of Sun’s ZFS file system) and led by Bill Moore as CEO (former head of storage at Sun). …
Sometime before the end of this year, it will be possible to get a petabyte of raw flash storage capacity that fits within a 3U rack enclosure, and if current trends persist, such a device will cost the same or less than a disk array equipped with reasonably capacious and zippy disk drives. …
The hyperconverged upstarts may have created the market for server-storage hybrids to support clusters of virtual machines, but it may be VMware that benefits most from this movement as customers look to simplify their infrastructure for supporting virtualized applications in their datacenters. …
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