#199 - Quantifying Data Storage Innovation

This week, Chris and Martin discuss the level of innovation seen in the data storage industry over the last decade. This topic is one that comes up repeatedly as we review the market, startups and incumbents. In reality, of course there’s been innovation, whether the “micro-innovations” that move the storage media industry along, or the more significant changes like NVMe and persistent memory.

What happens when you look at innovation by market spending or VC investments? Is there an alignment of innovation with the development of patentable technology? Finally, the discussion concludes with areas where innovation is missing, including the perennial favourite, storage management tools.

Elapsed Time: 00:51:27

Timeline

00:00:00 – Intros
00:01:15 – What does innovation mean in data storage?
00:02:20 – What is innovation?
00:04:40 – Explaining innovation with Dyson vacuum cleaners
00:06:50 – Has most storage innovation occurred in media?
00:10:15 – What storage solutions innovation have we seen?
00:12:10 – NVMe is a standards-based innovation
00:15:20 – Persistent Memory is an innovation waiting to gain mass adoption
00:18:30 – Is open-source storage an innovation?
00:21:25 – SmartNICs and Computational Storage are new innovations
00:24:50 – Can we use market share to determine innovation?
00:26:20 – Whatever happened to ATMOS?
00:31:00 – Could innovation be tracked by VC investments?
00:35:00 – Innovation is needed in the cloud for storage APIs
00:35:50 – Container-attached storage – a good investment?
00:38:35 – Is innovation aligned with patentable technology?
00:39:30 – Public cloud storage innovation is missing – or perhaps obfuscated?
00:40:40 – Doing block storage is hard!
00:42:45 – What unrealised storage innovations exist? Storage Management?
00:47:05 – Data Security still needs some work to become more “DRM-like”.
00:49:30 – Wrap Up

Related Podcasts & Blogs

Podcast: Play in new window | Download