The Future of Storage Technology

EE Times recounts a recent briefing at the IBM Almaden Research Center, where the company touted its plans to reclaim a lead in the storage market.

There's talk about tape drives, disk arrays, and chip-based alternatives where IBM appears to be placing the most focus. This points to an interesting trend in recognizing the mechanical limitations of disk-only systems.

Call it what you will, but the imbalance in the data center between increasingly powerful servers and slower mechanical disks is now rearing its head. The storage world is now less about capacity, but more and more about the ability to access data quickly and predictably. The movement towards chip-based solutions that make more use of memory and less use of spinning magnetic media is a step in the right direction.