Thursday, September 6, 2007

Storage Q3

Storage keeps getting cheaper - Consumers pay $0.86 per gByte (compared to $1.28) a year ago and already 6% of mobile PCs have a capacity of 160GB+. Seagate's 65mm disk for laptops has 250GB (Momentus 5400.4, Serial ATA 3.0 Gbit/sec).

Storage as a service - starts to get more attention see: Amazon S3, Nirvanix (a fully fledged file system the Internet Media File System - IMFS). Facebook has open Data Store API beta program that may indicate plans to offer a data storage service to developers. MS announces Office Live Workspace a free (initially) online storage, file-sharing and collaboration service for users of MS Office (via a "Save as command). A click on a workspace document previews it in the browser (IE/Firefox) and a double click downloads it.

SANs - Dell MD3000i, uses iSCSI, $10k to support up to 16 host servers, room for expansion, and backup and recovery SW - it uses SAS/SATA drives to store up to 18TB on 45 drives

Solid state disk
- In Q1 next year BitMicro Networks will ship E-Disk Altima 416GB ship solid-state disk (throughput of up to 100-133MB/sec).
- Solid-state drives (64GB NAND flash memory) in be a $1k option in all professional series laptop HP PCs (faster, use less power, more durable/shock resistent than disk drives) allowing the PCs to be 25% lighter. Samsung already offer SSDs (32GB/64GB)

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