appICU

by Woody Hutsell, http://www.appICU.com

It feels like I just participated in my billionth solid state storage product launch. In fact, I have participated in quite a few since the year 2000. In almost chronological order, here are the solid state storage systems I can recall launching into the market. If you are a solid state storage historian, you should pay close attention to the following table:

Some additional observations on trends over this period:

• Prices have come down from $5,000/GB in 2000 to below $10/GB in 2015. That means solid state storage costs 0.20% of what it cost 15 years ago.
• Capacity per rack unit in 2000 was 10 GB/RU. Capacity per rack unit in 2015 is 28,500 GB/RU. In the past 15 years solid state storage density has increased by 2,850x. Mind-blowing, really.
• Latency exhibited by the RAM-based products was very consistent and low over the 10 year period. Considerable cost, density, and persistence advantages forced a move to NAND flash memory in 2007, but latency for the flash-based products has remained consistently below 250 microseconds over the last 8 years.
• The continual trend to lower cost per bit NAND technologies (SLC to eMLC to MLC).
• There has been a consistent investment in enhanced data protection that started with protecting the memory in RAM using Chipkill and subsequently Variable Stripe RAID, a patented TMS technology.
• TMS, and now IBM, has improved RAS features as the systems evolved, from requiring two units for data protection to requiring only one highly available system.
• We’ve recently seen more demand for advanced storage services as the market for all flash arrays broadened from application acceleration to Tier 1 disk replacement.

Looking to make predictions about the future of solid state storage? A quick glance at the rate of product innovation and the reasons for change over the last 15 years can tell you much about how the industry will continue to evolve.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 7th, 2015 at 10:49 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.