In a recent report by research firm IHS iSuppli, the sale of solid-state NAND flash drives are projected to increase by 400% in 2011 driven by increasing adoption of tablets which primarily use flash memory for data storage.
This model is driving the growth of digital storage in data centers and thus the sale of hard disk drives, tape storage and flash memory used in enterprise storage tiers for these data centers.
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The increased use of flash memory storage has lead to new storage interfaces that can take advantage of the higher data rates that NAND flash based digital storage can provide.
As PCIe products move from Generation 2 to Generation 3 with a doubling of the data rate per PCIe communications lane, flash based storage devices using this interface as their data transfer backbone will enable very high performance systems.
At the LSI Accelerated Innovation Summit this week the company was demonstrating a number of products geared to using PCIe flash storage solutions in data center application.
Fusion-io is known for its high performance PCIe storage products and IO Turbine is offering technology for using flash storage for caching data in a virtualized enterprise environment.
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Cloud is also driving evolutionary change in its components, like server microvisors for stronger security, low cost Flash storage for large data sets and energy-saving chips.
PCIe is becoming popular for flash memory storage devices since it offers much faster data rates than traditional SATA , SAS or Fibre Channel interfaces, which flash memory storage devices can make use of.
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WD's innovative hybrid technology pairs MLC NAND flash storage for fast SSD-like data throughput and instant-on responsiveness with magnetic disks for efficient, high-capacity storage.
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Two big disruptions have upended the enterprise data center and infrastructure stack for large companies: virtualization and flash storage.
This piece will discuss Nimble Storage, Proximal Data, Fusion-io and IBM flash memory hardware and software enterprise offerings.
It competes with IBM, EMC, NetApp, Hewlett-Packard and Hitachi Data Systems in the storage hardware market by selling products like flash drives, magneto-optical drives, magnetic tape drives and compact drives that are used for backing up data on servers.
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Flash as a form of solid state storage is much faster for reading and writing data than the spinning disks in traditional disk drives.
The result is flash-based performance that rivals DRAM, with data speeds dramatically exceeding even SSD-based storage arrays.
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Using a combination of HDD and flash memory in either a hybrid HDD or a dual storage notebook computer, where frequently used data (and possibly the operating system and application software) is kept in the flash memory, while the bulk of user content is kept on the HDD, has been shown to provide about 80% of the performance improvements of a pure SSD-based computer.
New storage systems are increasing using flash memory for system acceleration, such as faster transaction processing and data base searches.
Demand for high-performance 3-bit MLC NAND flash and 128Gb high storage capacities has been rapidly increasing, driving the adoption of SSDs with more than 250GB data storage, led by the Samsung SSD 840 Series.
Getting to that stage might mean combining self-assembly methods with lithography, or doing away with the head that reads the data-packed disk and instead creating a self-assembling solid-state system on the model of Flash memory storage used today.
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