This week we talk to Mark Carlson, co-chair of the SNIA Technical Council, about the storage needs of hyperscalers. Mark defines hyperscalers as those companies opening multiple data centres a year, most notably Amazon, Microsoft Azure, Google and Facebook in the US and Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent in China. These vendors are deploying petabytes of storage a year, with specific requirements on storage media. The hyperscaler applications have issues with HDD and SSD performance characteristics, such as tail latency and the effects of garbage collection. As a result, drive manufacturers are building in new features …
