Bigger, Faster, Cheaper Flash in Demand But Cold?

By the time you get this message, I'll be in the dead zone. Capa, Sunshine, DNA Films, 2007 You have to wonder if this years Flash Memory Summit (FMS) didnt have Al Shugart, a hard drive pioneer, spinning in his grave. There are a whole lot of silicon engineers hell-bent on moving his technology to a dusty corner of the Computer Museum. Shugart was a key developer of IBMs RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control) disk system that stored a whopping 5MB of data. Today, no kid would look twice at a smartphone or tablet if it didnt have at least 32GB (1GB = 1,024MB). Storage is arguably more important than all of the chip compute power because without it, the chip wouldnt have anything to read and couldnt put stuff away for later. Spinning disks and discs have traditionally been the weapon of choice for storage because they hold a lot of stuff and theyve always been relatively cheap. Now there are people who want to change all of that. Its not that they dont have a big enough stake just focusing on making the consumer device market bigger. Home Devices According to IDC, we have:

15 devices per home in industrialized countries 2B smartphones 300M tablets 1B network-enabled retail CE devices 4B cloud-ready PC/CE devices 3B Internet users

With more than 7B people on the planet, there are still a lot of folks the chip people can focus on and connect to the ROW (rest of world).

Still Plenty of Growth We know you think everyone must be on the Internet but except for the few industrial countries, online penetration is only just beginning to become a reality. The big growth will come when low-cost smartphones are widely used as computing/communications devices. People in emerging countries cant afford the luxury of having a smartphone, tablet and computer; and the new lower-cost smartphones will let even more of them do more. Sure, they lust for a tablet and might settle for a computer; but theyre doing just fine at creating stuff with the device in their hands.

Smartphone Boom To date, smartphones have been expensive and many consumers have had to settle for feature phones. The introduction of lower-cost smartphones in emerging countries will put the voice/data capabilities into more peoples hands. At the rate were creating content, by 2015, it would take five years to watch all the video going across the network each second. While all the words, pictures, videos and whatever folks are creating, they are really focused on sharing all of their stuff with everyone else.

Overload With two plus billion people on the Internet taking advantage of global and local social media sites, the content that is sent, stored and viewed is mind-boggling. And that has made organizations like Facebook very big, very fast. Facebook Stats Jason Taylor, Facebooks Director of Infrastructure, noted they alone handle: 1.5B users 700M use their site daily 350M+ photos every day 4.5B likes, posts, comments daily

To keep up--and keep you from going somewhere else, they spend $1.24B annually on their data centers, networks and storage. Taylor agreed with EMC, a huge data center storage supplier, that only 5 percent of the stuff stored is active and, in fact, most of the stuff is never looked at but its kept just in case. Saving it for future generations is a whole different issue. EMC has been very successful (and kept CIOs and CFOs happy) by providing a scaled storage solution that ranges from hot (gotta have) to cold (its sitting there).

The 5 Percent According to almost every IT study, only about 5 percent of the data/content stored is really active and accessed/used on a regular basis. The remaining 95 percent of information that is stored is seldom (and often never) accessed. That works pretty well for the average data center because there are predictive analytics that let IT people do a good job of guessing whats hot and whats not so content can be shifted from high-performance (expensive) SSD (solid-state drive) to slower, high-capacity hard drives. But Taylor told the solid-state people he wanted them to make his life easier and save his boss money by no longer focusing on higher and higher performance/endurance solutions and making the switch to low-endurance, poor-performance, cheap cold flash. That would mean if you wanted some of that 95 percent data it might take a little longer to get but jeezz, Facebook could save a ton of money (power, space, time) and users would still be relatively certain their creations would be available to future users and data archiologists.

Data Archeology Saving data, creations and content is always important to IT people because weve produced more digital stuff in the last few years than we did in the previous 5,000 years! To preserve it requires more than solid state or hard drives. It requires a medium that's good for 50 plus years just sittin there, like optical.

More than History If it feels as though youre experiencing a data/information overload, you are. More content has been created in the past three years than was produced in the prior 5,000 years. The volume is going to double every two years and needs to be preserved. Source Panasonic And with all of those billions of smartphone, tablet and computer users going online, theyre only accelerating the storage demand to the point that IDC projects storage demand will increase 50-fold to more than 40 zetabytes (its huge).

Of course, to keep up with you, even people who make their living in the cloud have to keep their costs firmly planted on the ground.

Why the Cloud You may wonder why cloud storage entrusting a companys mission-critical, private data to a third party is so attractive to many finance officers. The reason is the cost, which is less about the storage device but also the need to backup, manage and preserve it. Thats probably why EMC is pushing the five HD companies (Seagate, WD, Toshiba, HGST and Samsung) to pack more data in smaller spaces on the spinning platters and even adding SSD on the front-end to deliver that cold data faster. The question is whether Facebook can be a big enough customer for down-n-dirty/cheap cold flash or if its something all the other cloud folks would embrace someday? According to most of the FMS attendees (lots of engineers), its an interesting idea, but they are already having a tough time finding the engineers (55,000 are expected to graduate this year in the U.S.); and they know theyre not going to have enough hands/minds to do it right now. So most of the speakers focused on the technology leaps they were making in delivering higher and higher write-endurance and performance for their fellow engineers in the PC, CE, auto, communications industries.

Growing Rugged Storage Companies are automating many of their operations and new systems with computerized intelligence. In many of the new designs, the company needs highspeed read/write performance, low power consumption and the ability to operate in a wide range of environments. Solid-state storage is excellent for many but not all - of these applications. 3D or No The more interesting news for most of the Summit was about 3D and non-3D NAND (another Wikipedia acronym). Samsung introduced their V-NAND technology that will let them pack more data on their small chips without having to retool or build a whole new production line (easily over $2B each).

Up, not Out To improve the use of the silicon real estate as well as reduce latency and power consumption, Samsung announced they would soon be shipping 3D V-NAND to customers as well as designing the chips into their upcoming products. The technology would produce lower power, lower latency, higher capacity chips by doing about the same thing city planners do building up instead of spreading out or trying to pack storage cells more closely together. More specifically, they say they can produce twice as many transistors per square millimeter, use half the power and store twice the data as todays chips while saving the content 10 times longer. And they dont have to add new equipment to do it! They see a big market for the devices in data centers but said they were also going to use the 3D flash in their computers and devices they seem to be selling so well. The folks at Toshiba, SanDisk and Micron are taking a different path with 2D memory and smaller silicon real estate. Theyre starting to ship SSD with 16-17 nm devices and figure they can be down to 10 nm (more capacity) in a couple of years. They didnt blow off Samsungs 3D now approach, but said the market wouldnt be ready for it until after 2015 (too expensive today for the performance/capacity/price). Ordinary folks can get by today with 32GB on their smartphone, 64GB on their tablet and 256GB of flash on their ultrabook as long as the cloud is handy.

Eternal Hope You cant do anything online today without touching the cloud, even if your content is just passing through. Those who only see the Put Your Stuff Here Free sign in front of the social media and storage sites can only hope the vital information isnt stolen, corrupted or lost. Facebooks Taylor will probably still be buying a ton of HDs to handle that 95 percent of the stuff thats never looked at and the five percent of data that is needed now! Then he needs to look at preserving that stuff for future generations.

Whatever the decision, its going to be a very interesting couple of years for the storage industry. As Capa said, I think it will be beautiful ... No, I'm not scared.