The Future of Storage

My preparation for a workshop on the future of storage included giving a talk at Seagate and talking to the all-flash advocates. Below the fold I attempt to organize into a coherent whole the results of these discussions and content from a lot of earlier posts.

Dr. Pangloss loves technology roadmaps

Its nearly three years since we last saw the renowned Dr. Pangloss chuckling with glee at the storage industry's roadmaps. But last week he was browsing Slashdot and found something much to his taste. Below the fold, an explanation of what the good Doctor enjoyed so much.

The Cloudy Future of Disk Drives

For many years, following Dave Anderson of Seagate, I've been pointing out that the constraints of manufacturing capacity mean that the only medium available on which to store the world's bulk data is hard disk. Eric Brewer's fascinating FAST2016 keynote, entitled Spinning Disks and their Cloudy Future and Google's associated white paper, start from this premise:

The rise of portable devices and services in the Cloud has the consequence that (spinning) hard disks will be deployed primarily as part of large storage services housed in data centers. Such services are already the fastest growing market for disks and will be the majority market in the near future.

Eric's argument is that since cloud storage will shortly be the majority of the market, and that other segments are declining, the design of hard drives no longer needs to be a compromise suitable for a broad range of uses, but should be optimized for the Cloud. Below the fold, I look into some details of the optimizations and provide some supporting evidence.

2016 FAST Conference

I've just finished attending the 2016 Usenix FAST conference. Eric Brewer of Google gave a fascinating keynote, which deserves a complete post to itself. Below the fold are notes on the papers that caught my eye, arranged by topic.