Claus's Blog

In my strange and wonderful tenure in this weird storage industry of ours, I’ve seen a lot of things (fads, hypes, and promises) come and go. And in that time, I’ve also developed (what I think is) a healthy sense of cynicism that comes with failed promises and predictions. Is “hype curve” one or two words?

The problem (not always bad, mind you) is that whether you’re a startup attempting to secure VC money or trying to get R&D funding within an established company, the gig is the same. How do you get someone to invest money in your scheme? The answer is obviously simple: you hype the hell out of it. Expectations soar, you’re in business, and now you only have to deliver. We often forget that last little fact.

One thing I’ve seen repeatedly is the constant prediction of the demise of the disk, or the hard drive. After all, mechanical things in our lives all seem to eventually disappear, being replaced by the electronic version of the same thing. Record players, 8-track tapes, cassettes, and CD players have all given way to iPhones and MP3 players. Telephones, with those round dials, even buttons, have yielded to voice recognition and speed dial. In fact, the only three components of a datacenter these days (that I can think of) that still largely rely on mechanical components are printers, tape devices, and storage. Even printing is becoming a victim of online reading and browsing (but will not disappear in my career or lifetime) and tape as a standalone technology is being marginalized by virtual tape (i.e. disk). That leaves storage and that little workhorse often overlooked: the hard drive. I’m fascinated that it is still around! And yes, it’s still round.

Off the top of my head I can recall the wild promises of bubble memory, crystal memory, optical memory, optical drives, holographic memory (that one is still some potential), and now SSD’s or flash drives. That last one also is a potential replacement for hard drives, but not for a very long time in my estimation. There are many other promising technologies that have made their way into the technology dumpster over the years.

Why is this? Well, for one reason, the disk drive guys, remarkably, continue to dramatically increase aerial densities and after 53 years of existence, that’s a tough act going. And at the same time they continue to deliver the goods at a 30%-35% decline in price every year. These are averages over a 53-year span but that’s still a tough rabbit to chase both from a technology perspective and an economic one.

Why am I writing about this now? Well, for one thing, as I bounce around the planet talking about technology, folks are more and more asking about the disk drive business. Where is it going; will it ever be replaced? The simple answer is: YES. I believe the disk drive will disappear. I won’t be around to see it and I might even question whether either of my two children will be around to see this total transformation.

But before I get into the “why” of this, let’s look at the past. A totally fascinating piece was assembled by Chris Preimesberger showing up on eWeek. If you ever want to know where we’re going, it’s always nice to see where we’ve come from. I hated history class in school, but I like it now, especially when it includes cool pictures, which this does. Check out this piece, and look at the specs attached to each picture. There is a term they use called “megabyte”. Anyone remember what that was?

But what does the future hold for the hard drive industry? Well, this little snippet published in The MIT Technology Review might give a hint. To give you a perspective, today’s densest drives are recorded at just under a terabit (tb) per square inch (or .155 tb per square cm for the metric fans amongst us). Seagate has now prototyped a technology called “heat (or thermally) assisted magnetic recording” or HAMR or TAMR that can drive densities up to 50 tb per sq/in. Are we looking at a 50 terabyte drive in a few years…probably. Hitachi Global Storage Technologies is working on “Patterned Recording” that has similarly grand claims of increased densities. This is by no means the only research activity on mega-densities but the most visible. Whether these happen or not is hard to say but we have an industry with an enviable track record. And anyone who thinks we won’t suck up that capacity as quickly as we can doesn’t ascribe to my “closet principle” which basically states there is no such thing as an empty closet. We’re a clever species and we’ll fill that capacity in short order. The next question here is how do we manage these capacities (see your local HDS rep for that answer but briefly it relates to storage virtualization and dynamic provisioning and archiving).

One question I do get a lot these days is whether SSD’s will replace the hard drive. My quick answer is “no”. We (HDS) love selling these things and they give incredible performance boosts to those cache unfriendly workloads that keep us up at night, but SSD’s replacing the whole drive industry in short order…I think not. I know EMC likes to position them as drive replacements, but I would argue seriously against this. They have their place, use them there, but they’re still a small segment of the market and show little short-term sign of dominance in the capacity space.

What might ultimately replace the hard drive? Well, boys and girls, if I knew the answer to that question I’d be sunning on my yacht anchored off a beach somewhere rather than writing this blog. But the best hope is what is generically called Storage Class Memories (SCM’s). Scientific American had a great article on this a few months ago, but if you click on the link I think they will ask you for money to read this, but there are many other articles on SCM’s that you can collect through your favorite search engine.

So where does this bring us? Well, in my little world I’d say the hard drive is here to stay and for a long time. Use them, enjoy them, fill them up, back them up, and replicate the contents. Especially in the data center where technologies such as dynamic provisioning, de-duplication, “spaceless” snapshots, and storage virtualization, mean that “virtual” capacity is different than physical capacity. And also remember that the cynic writing this blog might actually be wrong. I’d be interested in your thoughts…