🤦🏾 💐 ↙️ New storage technologies: is there a breakthrough in 2020? 🌜 🌧️ 👋

For several decades, progress in information storage technologies has been measured, first of all, in terms of storage capacity and speed of reading / writing data. Over time, these assessment parameters have been supplemented by technologies and methodologies that make HDD and SSD drives smarter, more flexible and easier to manage. Each year, drive manufacturers traditionally hint that the big data market will change, and 2020 is no exception. IT leaders are eagerly looking for effective ways to store and manage huge data streams, and, therefore, again promise to change the course of storage systems. In this article we have collected the most advanced technologies for posting information, as well as talk about the concepts of futuristic drives, which have yet to find their physical realization.

Software Defined Storage Networks

If we talk about the processes of automation, flexibility and increasing the storage capacity of information, coupled with an increase in the efficiency of personnel, more and more enterprises are considering the possibility of switching to the so-called software-defined storage networks or SDS (Software-Defined Storage).

A key feature of SDS technology is the separation of hardware from software: that is, virtualization of storage functions is implied . In addition, unlike conventional storage systems with a network connection (NAS) or storage area networks (SAN), SDS is designed to work in any standard x86 system. Quite often, the goal of deploying SDS is to improve operating expenses (OpEx), requiring less administrative effort.

The capacity of HDD-drives will grow up to 32 TB

Traditional magnetic drives have not died at all, but are only experiencing a technological renaissance. Modern HDDs can already offer users up to 16 TB of data storage. Over the next five years, this capacity will double. At the same time, hard disk drives will still remain the most affordable random access storage and will retain their primacy in the price per gigabyte of disk space for many more years.

Capacity expansion will be based on already known technologies:

Helium storage (helium reduces aerodynamic drag and turbulence, allowing you to install more magnetic plates in the drive; while the heat and energy consumption does not increase);
Thermomagnetic storage (or HAMR HDD, the appearance of which is expected in 2021 and is based on the principle of microwave data recording, when a section of the disk is heated by a laser and magnetized);
A tile-based HDD (or SMR-drives, where data tracks are placed one above the other, in tile format; this ensures a high density of information recording).

Helium storage devices are especially in demand in cloud data centers, and SMR HDDs are optimal for storing large archives and data libraries, access and updating data, which are not required very often. They are also ideal for creating backups.

NVMe drives get faster

The first SSDs were connected to motherboards via SATA or SAS, but these interfaces were developed over 10 years ago for magnetic HDDs. The modern NVMe protocol is a much more powerful communication protocol designed for systems that provide high speed data processing. As a result, at the turn of 2019-2020, we see a serious drop in prices for NVMe SSDs, which are becoming available for any class of users. In the enterprise segment, NVMe solutions are especially appreciated by those enterprises that need real-time big data analysis.

Companies such as Kingston and Samsung have already shown what corporate users can count on in 2020: we are all waiting for the appearance of NVMe SSDs with PCIe 4.0 support, which allow adding data centers even more speed when working with data. The claimed performance of new products is 4.8 GB / s, and this is far from the limit. The next generation of Kingston NVMe SSD PCIe gen 4.0 will be able to provide bandwidth at 7 GB / s.

Together with the NVMe-oF (or NVMe over Fabrics) specification, organizations will be able to create high-performance storage networks with minimal latency, which will compete with data centers with direct DAS (or Direct-attached storage) connections. At the same time, using NVMe-oF, I / O operations are processed more efficiently, while the delay is comparable to DAS systems. Analysts predict that deployment of NVMe-oF-based systems will accelerate rapidly in 2020.

QLC-memory finally "shoot"?

NAND Quad Level Cell (QLC) flash memory will also demonstrate growing market popularity. QLC was introduced in 2019 and therefore had minimal distribution in the market. This will change in 2020, especially among companies that have implemented LightOS Global Flash Translation Layer (GFTL) technology to overcome the inherent QLC problems.

According to analysts, sales growth of SSDs based on QLC cells will increase by 10%, while TLC solutions will “capture” 85% of the market. Whatever one may say, the QLC SSD is still far behind in performance compared to the TLC SSD and will not become the basis for the data center in the next five years.

At the same time, the cost of NAND flash memory is expected to increase in 2020, so the supplier of SSD controllers Phison, for example, is betting that price increases will ultimately push the consumer solid-state drive market to use 4-bit flash -Memory QLC NAND. By the way, Intel plans to launch 144-layer QLC solutions (instead of 96-layer products). Well ... it seems that we are waiting for further marginalization of the HDD.

SCM memory: speed close to DRAM

The widespread availability of SCM memory (Storage Class Memory) was predicted for several years, and 2020 could be the starting point at which these predictions will finally come true. While Intel Optane, Toshiba XL-Flash and Samsung Z-SSD memory modules have already entered the corporate market, their appearance did not cause a stunning reaction.

The Intel device combines the features of fast but unstable DRAM with the slower but persistent NAND storage. This combination aims to increase the ability of users to work with large amounts of data, providing both DRAM speed and NAND capacity. SCM memory is not just faster than NAND-based alternatives: it is ten times faster. The delay is microseconds, not milliseconds.

Market experts note that data centers planning to use SCM will be limited in that this technology will only work on servers using Intel processors of the Cascade Lake generation. However, in their opinion, this will not become a stumbling block to stop the wave of updates to existing data centers in order to ensure high speed information processing.

From foreseeable reality to the distant future

For most users, data storage is not associated with a sense of “capacitive Armageddon.” But just think: the 3.7 billion people currently using the Internet generate around 2.5 quintillion bytes of data daily. To meet this need, more data centers are needed.

According to statistics, by 2025 the world is ready to process 160 Zetabytes of data per year (this is more bytes than stars in the observable Universe). It is likely that further we will have to cover every square meter of planet Earth with data centers, otherwise corporations simply will not be able to adapt to such a high growth of information. Or ... you have to give up some data. However, there are several potentially interesting technologies that could solve the growing problem of information overflow.

DNA structure as the basis for future data warehouses

Not only IT corporations are looking for new ways to store and process information, but also many scientists. The global challenge is to ensure the preservation of information for millennia. Researchers from the Swiss Higher Technical School of Zurich (ETH Zurich, Switzerland) believe that the solution must be sought in the organic data storage system that exists in every living cell: in DNA. And most importantly - this system was "invented" long before the computer.

DNA strands are very complex, compact and incredibly dense, like information carriers: according to scientists, 455 exabytes of data can be written in grams of DNA, where 1 eB is equivalent to a billion gigabytes. The first experiments had already allowed us to record 83 Kbytes of information in DNA, after which the professor of the Department of Chemistry and Biological Sciences, Robert Grass, expressed the idea that in the new decade the medical field needs to be more closely integrated with the IT structure for joint developments in the field of recording technologies and data storage.

According to scientists, organic data storage chains based on DNA chains could be able to store information for up to a million years and accurately provide it at the first request. It is possible that in a few decades, most drives will struggle precisely for this opportunity: the ability to reliably and capaciously store data for a long time.

The Swiss are not the only ones working to create DNA-based storage systems. This question has been raised since 1953, when Francis Crick discovered the double helix of DNA. But at that moment, humanity simply did not have enough knowledge for such experiments. Traditional thinking in the field of DNA-based data storage is focused on the synthesis of new DNA molecules; comparing the sequence of bits with the sequence of four base pairs of DNA and creating enough molecules to represent all the numbers that need to be saved. So, in the summer of 2019, engineers from CATALOG managed to write 16 GB of the English-language “Wikipedia” into DNA created from synthetic polymers. The problem is that this process is slow and expensive, which is a significant bottleneck when it comes to data storage.

…:

Researchers from Brown University (Brown University, USA) say that a DNA molecule is not the only option for molecular storage of data for up to a million years. Low molecular weight metabolites can also act as organic storage. When information is written to a set of metabolites, the molecules begin to interact with each other and produce new electrically neutral particles that contain the data recorded in them.

By the way, the researchers did not stop there and expanded the range of organic molecules, which allowed to increase the density of recorded data. Reading such information is possible through chemical analysis. The only negative is that the implementation of such an organic storage device is not yet possible in practice, outside of laboratory conditions. This is just an operating time for the future.

5D optical memory: a revolution in data storage

Another experimental repository belongs to developers from the University of Southampton (University of Southampton, England). In an effort to create an innovative digital information storage system that can exist for millions of years, scientists have developed a process for writing data to a tiny quartz disk, which is based on femtosecond pulse recording. The storage system is designed for archiving and cold storage of large volumes of data and is described as five-dimensional storage.

Why five-dimensional? The fact is that information is encoded in several layers, including the usual three dimensions. Two more are added to these measurements - the size and orientation of the nanodots. The data capacity that can be written to such a mini-drive is up to 100 Petabytes, and the storage period is 13.8 billion years at temperatures up to 190 ° C. The maximum heating temperature that the disc can withstand is 982 ° C. In short ... it’s almost eternal!

Recently, the work of the University of Southampton has attracted the attention of Microsoft, whose Project Silica cloud storage program aims to rethink current storage technologies. According to the forecasts of the “soft” ones, by 2023 more than 100 Zetabytes of information will be stored in the clouds, so that even large-scale storage systems will have difficulties.

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New storage technologies: is there a breakthrough in 2020?