This week, Chris and Martin catch up with some of the storage hardware on show at Flash Memory Summit 2019. FMS is essentially a trade show and so there are lots of technologies on display that haven’t quite made it to the enterprise. Technology vendors are selling to other vendors and this year there were some interesting hardware solutions to see.
Flash has been on the agenda for the last decade and continues to push the boundaries of capacity and performance. Chris and Martin discuss 96+ layer products and the promise of 500 layers in the future. PLC or Penta-Level Cell NAND may be on the horizon but how would it be used? Could Optane (3D-XPoint) get cheaper and kill off new solutions like Z-NAND and XL-FLASH?
The discussion moves on to look at computational storage, a subject we recently discussed with NGD Systems. There still needs to be some work done to make these technologies easily adoptable, such as trusted code and device management. Storage Acceleration looks to improve performance of traditional databases, with Xilinx and Pliops showing solutions.
Finally, Martin and Chris discuss Burlywood and the optimising of SSDs. Storage hardware is definitely back!
Vendors covered in this podcast:
- Toshiba (XL-FLASH)
- Samsung (Z-NAND)
- NGD Systems (Computational Storage)
- Xilinx & Pliops (FPGA acceleration)
- Burlywood (SSD optimisation)
- Liqid (Composable infrastructure)
Elapsed Time: 00:30:06
Timeline
- 00:00:00 – Intros – Friday 13th!
- 00:00:44 – Flash Memory Summit 2019
- 00:01:30 – Where is NAND Flash headed? 96 Layers!
- 00:03:00 – The mythical 100TB drive
- 00:03:56 – Is PLC (penta-level cell) a reality?
- 00:06:00 – Intelligent flash drives could be on the way
- 00:06:40 – Zee-NAND or Zed-NAND?
- 00:07:54 – Could price declines in Optane kill of Z-NAND & XL-FLASH?
- 00:09:15 – Compute and storage getting closer – computational storage
- 00:10:40 – Compute on storage has been done before….
- 00:12:14 – Who will write code for computational storage devices?
- 00:15:10 – How will the codebase be managed across thousands of drives?
- 00:16:20 – Storage Accelerator cards using FPGAs (Xilinx & Pliops)
- 00:19:00 – Composable (e.g. Liqid) with accelerator cards
- 00:20:50 – Are future storage startup exits likely to be via hyper-scalers?
- 00:22:23 – Burlywood – SSD optimisation
- 00:24:30 – Burlywood has so many acquisition choices….
- 00:26:00 – Public cloud will be a rich seam of future storage podcasts
- 00:28:04 – So are we seeing a renaissance in storage hardware?
- 00:29:21 – Wrap Up
Related Podcasts & Blogs
- #117 – Introduction to Computational Storage with NGD Systems
- #113 – The Expanding Storage Hierarchy with Erik Kaulberg
- The Expanding Storage Hierarchy
- What is Software Composable Infrastructure?
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