Flash storage, which has been out there for years, is moving forward at an accelerated pace. That’s good news, since data continues to move forward at an even faster pace.
There is 5 ZB of data out there today, and that’s expected to research 44 ZB within a decade, as an article posted October 15 on EnterpriseStorageForum.com notes. Flash technology aims to address the data onslaught by delivering cheaper, denser, and faster solutions with longer lives, the piece points out.
While traditional storage relied on spinning disks, today disks are all electronic memory, so involve faster spinning disks that allow people to boot up their devices in five to 10 seconds vs. a minute or two with spinning disks, Jeff Barber, vice president of IBM (News - Alert), told me earlier this week. (IBM sells DS8000 hybrid flash storage.) But with the flash technology, which is what is used in our cell phones, there’s no moving device inside and that memory is called flash memory and ensures your device doesn’t lose its data.
“Flash storage is one of the hottest, fastest growing enterprise technology markets today,” Shachar Fienblit of Kaminario wrote in a July blog. “It’s truly an exciting time to innovate an industry that is disrupting the legacy storage market and growing at an incredible rate.”
Fienblit points to flash technology breakthroughs including 3D NAND and TLC Flash.
EnterpriseStorageForum.com explains that Intel (News - Alert) and Micro Technology 3D NAND allows for the stacking of more layers of flash vertically, multiplying capacity by three times and addressing power consumption. TLC, which stands for triple-level cell, stores three bits per cell, according to the Micron website. The ability to multiply storage in this way is an improvement on the initial iterations of flash, which started life packaged in solid state drives that worked with existing hard disk drives that could only do one operation at a time due to the single actuator arm, the article noted.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson