Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

The Next Decade In Storage

Posted by Soulskill on from the filling-those-50TB-hard-drives-faster-than-you-expect dept.

Esther Schindler writes: In this article, Robin Harris predicts what storage will be like in 2025. And, he says, the next 10 years will be the most exciting and explosive in the history of data storage. For instance: "There are several forms of [Resistive RAM], but they all store data by changing the resistance of a memory site, instead of placing electrons in a quantum trap, as flash does. RRAM promises better scaling, fast byte-addressable writes, much greater power efficiency, and thousands of times flash's endurance. RRAM's properties should enable significant architectural leverage, even if it is more costly per bit than flash is today. For example, a fast and high endurance RRAM cache would simplify metadata management while reducing write latency."

22 of 93 comments (clear)

  1. Maybe by jandrese · · Score: 4, Insightful

    There are a dozen different memory technologies that "in 10 years time" will revolutionize everything. I'll believe it when I see it. Until this, this gets filed away with Bubble RAM and whatnot in the "will be nice if it ever pans out" file.

    --

    I read the internet for the articles.
    1. Re:Maybe by The+Grim+Reefer · · Score: 2

      Legacy spinning disks will be as dead in 10 years as tape is today.

      I can't tell if you are being sarcastic or serious. But tape is no where near dead as backup media for business. Very few people used tape for home backup. Spinning disks are still in most homes. I don't think spinning disks will be anywhere close to to being as "scarce" as tape is today. For cheap massive online storage, it's still pretty hard to beat. For streaming video, it's a fantastic solution. And with the way resolution for video is going, spinning disks are perfect.

      I have a mix of SSD and spinning disks. I probably have around 50TB of spinning disks for video, music, pictures and documents. I also have 7 external spinning disks for backup. I'd be very surprised if this will change much in the next ten years. Unless some new terabyte plus writable bluray replacement comes along, or prices on SSD take a huge nosedive.

    2. Re:Maybe by mlts · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Storage is in tiers, and each tier is different. From the stuff in registers to what is stashed on Amazon Glacier, and everything in between (RAM, SSD, HDD, etc.) A revolution at one strata will have a completely different impact than a revolution at another level.

      Take RRAM, MRAM, or some random access memory technology which is up to speed with DRAM, except cheaper and doesn't need refreshed. This would end up not just supplanting RAM, but also making inroads on SSD, depending how inexpensive it is. Will this fundamentally change computing? Somewhat, although I doubt that RRAM would ever drop near the price of HDD or even SSD.

      Or, take WAN bandwidth. If the average home had terabytes of bandwidth, a phone had the same, this would change things fundamentally. Cloud storage could go from stashing occasional files to being a tier 2 NAS, especially with proper client security and encryption. However, this is extremely unlikely as well.

      Perhaps a tape drive company is able to make reliable media with the bit density of hard disk platters, and is able to fit 100 TB on a cartridge for $10, with drives costing $500. Far-fetched, but if this happens, it would have a different impact to computing than memory costing 1/100 of what it does... but it would be significant.

      Improvements in the middle tiers may or may not help things. Bigger hard drives will have to deal with currently small I/O pipes, making array rebuild times longer, and forcing businesses to go past RAID 6 to ensure the drives have protection when things get degraded. Already, some arrays can take 24 hours to rebuild from one lost HDD, and if capacity increases without I/O coming with it, we might have to have RAID levels that factor in not just two levels of parity, but three or four, perhaps with another level just for bit rot checking.

      So, when someone says that there are storage breakthroughs... it really depends on the tier that the breakthrough happens at.

    3. Re:Maybe by mcrbids · · Score: 4, Informative

      Get off my lawn, blah blah...

      Meanwhile, flash has revolutionized storage. We saw at least a 95% reduction in query times on our DB servers when we switched from RAID5 15K SAS drives to RAID1 flash SSDs. Floppies are history, and 32 GB thumb drives cost $5. SSDs have been catching up to their HDD brethren, now just 2-4 years behind the cost/capacity curve, and spinning rust has just about reached EOL, with Shingled Hard drives that make you choose between write speeds and write capacity being a necessary compromise for increased capacity.

      I have no idea why you'd be so dismissive.

      --
      I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
    4. Re:Maybe by lgw · · Score: 2

      Too many of us have "gone to the backup tapes" and found them to be corrupted.

      1 - That tape was bad when written - verify at least some after write and you're fine.

      2 - Old-school home backup drives were total crap: QIC, crap; DAT, crap. But LTO is solid. Not perfect -- do that verify -- but worlds apart from the low-end crap tape that has all vanished.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    5. Re: Maybe by robi5 · · Score: 2

      You are the second guy who thinks the gp wrote tape is dead. He wrote hdd will be AS dead AS tape is today. No more, no less. I.e. as a backup media if that (ssd follows moore's law but hdd?).

    6. Re:Maybe by sabri · · Score: 2

      I can't tell if you are being sarcastic or serious. But tape is no where near dead as backup media for business.

      I'm serious, but you are right. In the near future, spinning disks will be used for the same applications and seen as the dinosaur of technology: backup and low-performance works.

      The truth of the matter is that spinning disks are simply to slow for modern day technology. Compare your laptop when using a 7200rpm disk or an SSD. Compare your Oracle database query times when using a legacy storage vendor or an all flash array that can do 1 million IOPS . It is the performance aspect that matters in modern day computing. The bottleneck is storage, not your CPU, not your memory, storage.

      It makes all the difference, especially in transaction-driven enterprises. But sure, for backups you can use spinning disks or tape. Just as our modern cars run on dinosaurs, for every legacy technology, there is still a usecase. I like to run my MSX emulator once in a while :)

      --
      I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
    7. Re:Maybe by trparky · · Score: 2

      I'd have to call bullshit on the "most give you either SMART warning or "delayed write failure" errors long before they die" part. I've had many a drive that was working fine one day, monitoring software showed no signs of pending drive failure, and then... dead the next day. *click* *click* *click* *click* *cry*

      You say the problem with SSDs is when wafer shrink, well... it seems that manufacturers have thought about that and have gone back to larger lithograph processes. In fact, Samsung has done just that with their 850 Series SSDs by going to 40nm and 3D-NAND. Not only has Samsung done this but Intel has also been considering SSDs of their own to have 3D-NAND.

    8. Re:Maybe by Phishcast · · Score: 2

      That's some pretty old-school thinking there. For modern storage arrays with decent caching algorithms the level of RAID protection often has little to do with IO response time and throughput. I've dealt with DBAs who have insisted their archive and redo logs live on RAID-1 or RAID-10 storage because that's what they were taught oh-so-long-ago. They want me to carve out and dedicate four spindles for them to do RAID-1 on a storage array with nearly a thousand spinning disks in it. I've got a storage array with half a terabyte of cache or more, 100% write cache hits and 95+% read cache hits. 4 spindles vs 1000 servicing IO with some extra RAID overhead? Not a difficult call.

  2. Re:In other news, NSA funds storage technology by sabri · · Score: 3, Insightful

    NSA guy sees "metadata management" and has a wet dream.

    That's not metadata as you think of it. It's the metadata associated with storage.

    --
    I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
  3. Re:In other news, NSA funds storage technology by Em+Adespoton · · Score: 2

    NSA guy sees "metadata management" and has a wet dream.

    That's not metadata as you think of it. It's the metadata associated with storage.

    But... it's just metadata, isn't it?

  4. Bubble Memory by io333 · · Score: 2

    I want my Bubble Memory. I have been waiting 35 years for it.

    1. Re:Bubble Memory by Tablizer · · Score: 2

      I want my Bubble Memory. I have been waiting 35 years for it.

      They misread the request and gave us a mortgage bubble instead.

      --
      Table-ized A.I.
    2. Re:Bubble Memory by peragrin · · Score: 2

      I see your bubble memory and raise you holographic memory.

      --
      i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
    3. Re:Bubble Memory by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      Well, now we have MRAM, which is kinda-similarish and which does the same job exactly. And while we don't have it in our PCs yet, it is being used in consumer-level devices in very tiny quantities. If MRAM ever gets cheap enough to replace storage, then we'll really see a shift.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  5. Technologically maybe... by Kjella · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Practically I don't feel it's very significantly different anymore. Sure a little faster CPU, a little faster GPU, a little more RAM, bigger and cheaper SSDs but it's mostly the same. To feel that big a difference what you had before must have been rather crap, I still remember how adding a Gravis Ultrasound turned PC sound from shit to excellent. Or adding a new graphics card so you could have transparent, splashing water in Morrowind. Getting a floppy drive for my C64 so I didn't have to wait ages for the tape player. I hereby predict this will be the least exciting decade for storage, except the ones that follow it.

    --
    Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    1. Re:Technologically maybe... by sound+vision · · Score: 2

      Remember when burning a CD took more time than playing it (and maybe took more than 1 disc)?

    2. Re:Technologically maybe... by phoenix_rizzen · · Score: 2

      Going from an IBM PC-compatible system with a 4 MHz CPU and a Hercules Monochrome graphics chipset (16 shades of amber FTW!) over to a friend's house where he had a dual-speed external CD-ROM playing Wing Commander 3 with FMV was a quantum leap in computing power (I think it was a 486?).

      Going from that IBM PC-comptabile system to a Compaq Presario all-in-one with a 486sx2 66 Mhz CPU, VGA graphics, onboard SB16-compatible sound, and a 19.2K modem was the next quantum leap. Using the computer to browse BBSes and talk with people over FIDOnet around the world blew my teenage mind.

      Going from a SoundBlaster 16-compatible sound chipset to a Gravis Ultrasound ACE (and all the extra cables that required) in my own 486dx4 133 MHz system was another quantum leap in computing power. Playing MOD trackers and MIDI files off the Internet just blew my mind. A sub-512 KB file that sounded like a full symphony of real instruments? Mind ... blown!

      Going from a 19.2 K modem to a K56Flex modem (the non-standard 56.6 Kbps setup) and connecting to a K56Flex modem pool at the local college and hearing those extra beeps at the end, and actually connecting at 53.3 Kbps was mind-boggling. Under 10 minutes to download 1 MB (or something like that)! Web browsing was now a thing!

      But storage hasn't really blown me away. Sure, going from dual 5.25" floppies (under a MB of storage) to single 3.5" floppies (over a MB of storage) to CD-R/RW to DVD-R/RW to USB flash stick was interesting, but not mind-boggling. Going from a 40 MB HD to a 20 GB HD to multi-TB HDs is awesome, but not "mind ... blown" territory. Progress has been steady over the past 20 years without any real giant leaps.

      About the only thing in storage that has really amazed me is ZFS and how easy it makes managing storage systems in the 10-100 TB range with disks spread across multiple JBOD chassis. But even that was done in a steady progression over the past 7 years or so, without any real giant leaps.

      Maybe if MRAM, RRAM, memristors, and all that other non-volatile RAM stuff actually appears, then storage will be existing again. Otherwise, it'll just continue to plod along, slow and steady, with capacities increasing each year, and prices slowly coming down, and speeds increasing slowly. Storage is actually one of the least exciting areas of technology right now.

  6. There is one last revolution for storage by Headw1nd · · Score: 2

    I feel the time is fast approaching when there is no difference between RAM and storage, and when that happens it will set the stage for a quantum leap in programming. Not only will it eliminate the ever-present need to shuttle back and forth to some slow long term storage media to retrieve this or that, but it will change the assumption that a program being run is inherently different than one that is stored. I believe the fusion of the two will bring about some revolutionary concepts.

    1. Re:There is one last revolution for storage by PRMan · · Score: 2

      This is already the case on most phone apps.

      --
      Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
    2. Re:There is one last revolution for storage by Tailhook · · Score: 3, Interesting

      HP is marketing these ideas as "The Machine." The basic concept is using Re-RAM (ions) for all storage, fiber optics (photons) for all communications and electronics (electrons) for all processing. Ions, photons and electrons in a flattened crossbar matrix. Look up Martin Fink's recent presentations if you need a Buck Rogers fix.

      The incredibly small, simple and easy to fabricate cell structure that Re-RAM seems to offer is just too compelling to ignore. Crossbar (the company) appears to be solving the Re-RAM problem. All we're trying to do is move ions around with current. There is a long list of possible materials and designs yet to be investigated. Eventually a sweet spot will be found. When that happens non-volatile storage density and speed will leap forward an order of magnitude, and the whole storage stack from the CPU cache to the tape drive will get flatter.

      Or not. It's not like we need this to make the future exciting. Humanoid robots alone will provide more than enough excitement for the rest of my life.

      --
      Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
  7. Re:Won't be as big an impact as predicted by Guspaz · · Score: 2

    RAM that doesn't get wiped when I lose power? Well, modern operating systems basically simulate that anyhow. Who actually turns off a laptop instead of just closing the lid to sleep it? And even when you do turn something like Windows off, these days it actually just goes to sleep or hibernates in the background. There are also diminishing returns for throwing more RAM at problems, so going from the current, say, 16GB to 1TB isn't going to change much. Loading games, for example, still would take time, because the system still has to decompress stuff. Going from SSDs that can do 100MB/s to SSDs that can do 500MB/s didn't reduce load times by 80%.