On Monday, Chris Mellor at
The Register had a
piece with a somewhat misleading title that provides a good summary of the
argument we've been making since at least early 2011 that the Kryder rate, the rate of annual decrease in the cost per byte of storage, had slowed dramatically. As we have shown, this slowing has
huge implications for the cost of long-term storage.
Today, Chris is back with a
similar summary of Preeti Gupta et al's MASCOTS paper,
An Economic Perspective of Disk vs. Flash Media in Archival Storage. This paper reports on some more sophisticated economic modelling that supports the argument of
DAWN: a Durable Array of Wimpy Nodes. This 2011 technical report showed that, using a similar fabric to Carnegie-Mellon's 2009
FAWN: a Fast Array of Wimpy Nodes for long-term storage instead of computation, the
running costs would be low enough to overcome the much higher cost of
the flash media as compared to disk
Andrew Orlowski at The Register points out that our concerns about the future of storage costs are shared by Huawei:
ReplyDelete“We worry about that,” Cameron Bahar, Huawei’s CTO of Storage, told El Reg.
More, at least partial, support for the DAWN architecture comes from Brian Cox, SanDisk’s senior director in marketing for enterprise storage talking to Chirs Mellor at The Register:
ReplyDelete"Cox also sees a flash WORM (Write Once Read Many) use case with archived photos and videos for Facebook, Flickr and NetFlix. TLC flash can be used as the archived data is not rewritten and the technology's write endurance limitations don’t matter so much."
Chris Mellor at The Register reports that VMware's CTO is starting to think along the lines of DAWN.
ReplyDelete