From IBM’s RAMAC with its 5 MB of storage in a cupboard sized box to today’s 4 TB per hard disk, capacities in storage have gone up with prices coming down. “Prices have come down as storage capacity has increased barring last year when the flooding in Thailand led to a temporary reversal of this trend,” Rao said.
Some of the applications that are driving the storage market are surveillance (airports, train stations, govt. offices, city surveillance etc), databases (UID, PAN etc), the private Cloud (state data centers based on the private Cloud) and electronic content management.
“A typical government organization has a requirement of hundreds of thousands of PCs and there is no way for the data to be backed up easily. If you are looking at backing up each and every PC, its not practical to go around with a hard drive to each one of them. One option would be to back up to the state data center based on the private Cloud,” said Rao.
Today everybody is talking about unified storage offering both NAS and SAN in the same box. “You don’t have to buy two sets of storage,” he said.
In terms of performance, SATA is like a bus that can store huge amounts of data but is slow, FC/SAS is like a car and SSDs are like expensive private jets. Storage tiering can help use all three optimally. Deduplication, that turns mountains of data into mole hills, is another useful technology.
Some possible future of storage were outline where salt could be used to boost the storage density on a traditional magnetic platter, heat could be used for recording bits or data could be written on DNA.