Scott Davis, Infinio CTO. Scott drives product and technology strategy for Infinio while also acting as a key company evangelist. He joined Infinio following seven successful years at VMware, where he was CTO for VMware’s End User Computing Business Unit.
Over the next few days we intend to publish and discuss some of Scott’s storage predictions for 2016. Scott’s first prediction relates to Storage-Class Memory (SCM) technology and the increasing trend towards Server-Side caching and acceleration. SCM will be another major storage disruptive technology and will change the way organisations design, implement and deploy storage solutions.
1. Emergence of Storage-Class Memory – further driving the trend towards server-side storage.
SCM storage technology will fundamentally change today’s storage industry just as dramatically as flash changed the hard drive industry. Intel/Micron calls one version 3D XPoint and HP/SanDisk have joined forces for another variant. SCM is persistent memory technology – 1,000 times faster than flash, 1,000 times more resilient, and unlike flash, it delivers symmetric read/write performance. SCM devices connect to memory slots in a server and they are mapped and accessed similarly to memory, although they are slightly slower. Unlike previous generations of storage technology, SCM devices can be addressed atomically at either the byte level or block-level granularity. Operating systems will likely expose them as either very fast block storage devices formatted by traditional file systems and databases (for compatibility) or as direct memory mapped “files” for next-generation applications. Hypervisors will likely expose them as new, specially named and isolated SCM regions for use by applications running inside the guest operating system (OS).Scott expects that SCM will provide unprecedented storage performance, upend the database/file system structures we’ve grown accustomed to, and further drive the trend towards server-side storage processing, shaking up everything from storage economics to application design.