NAND Archives - Unpacked Network

#138 – Storage Predictions for 2020 (Part I)

Chris Evans 10 January 2020Garbage Collection

This week Chris and Martin are joined by Chris Mellor for what is turning into an annual look at storage technology for the year ahead. We should point out that this is only for enterprise storage and not a forecast on the world in general! We start with a discussion on media. At the macro level, capacities continue to grow for SSDs and HDDs year on year. This trend is expected to continue, but what micro-level advancements are being made? QLC increases in layers, while PLC (penta-level cell) flash is being mooted as increasingly more …

#105 – Introduction to VAST Data (Part I) with Howard Marks (Sponsored)

Chris Evans 21 June 2019All-Flash, Guest Speakers, Sponsored, Storage Hardware, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week, Chris and Martin talk to Howard Marks, Chief Storyteller at VAST Data. You may know Howard as an independent analyst and author for a range of online publications. Howard recently joined VAST to help explain and promote understanding of their data platform architecture. The VAST Data platform uses three main technologies that have only recently emerged onto the market. QLC NAND flash provides long-term, cheap and fast permanent storage. 3D-XPoint (branded as Intel Optane) is used to store metadata and new data before it is committed to flash. NVMe over Fabrics provides the …

#54 – Are we at All-flash and HDD Array Price Parity?

Chris Evans 22 June 2018Garbage Collection

This week, Chris and Martin discuss the subject of price parity between all-flash and hybrid or HDD-based storage arrays. From Martin’s perspective, he is starting to see vendor pricing getting close to parity and it making more sense to buy all-flash than a spinning media device. However, what are the issues? TCO is one – it’s not all about array pricing. Also, flash offers more opportunity to be Opex focused, as it’s easier to increment flash in an array than adding many disks to maintain performance. So what about hybrid? Does it have a position, …

#44 – Ultra High Capacity Flash Drives

Chris Evans 30 March 2018Garbage Collection

This week, Chris and Martin discuss the availability of super-high capacity or ultra-capacity flash drives. The conversation comes out of an announcement from Nimbus Data that has produced a 100TB SATA SSD. This follows up from last year’s 50TB drives that were OEMed to Viking and Smart Modular. You can find some more background at Architecting IT here. With so much capacity in a single 3.5″ form factor that could cost upwards of $50,000, is this product practical? How do the drives survive failure? Can they be repaired and who would build systems from them? …

#34 – NAND Shortage? What NAND Shortage! with Jim Handy

Chris Evans 19 January 2018Guest Speakers

In this week’s podcast, the team chat again with Jim Handy from Objective Analysis. Jim is an analyst covering the semiconductor industry and provides some great insight into where pricing is headed in the NAND flash market. The conversation covers some of the technical challenges the industry faces, as well as the impact from China entering the market. Finally, the guys discuss the impact on Enterprise storage pricing. There are some interesting observations in this conversation, such as the capability for NAND to be used in multiple densities and how the ability for the Enterprise …

Talking NAND Flash With Jim Handy – Part One

Chris Evans 6 January 2017Guest Speakers

The following podcast was recorded with Jim Handy, from Objective Analysis on 12th December 2016. The discussion is all about NAND Flash, what it is, where it came from and what we can expect in the future. Martin and Chris talked to Jim for a little over an hour, so we’ve split the content into two parts. You can reach Jim on Twitter at The SSD Guy, or via his blog(s) at http://thessdguy.com/ and http://thememoryguy.com/. Feel free to provide feedback as comments on our blog or on our Linkedin group. If you like this podcast, like …