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Clouds, Ultrabooks and the Evolution of Storage

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The use of cloud resources, including services and storage, to serve consumer needs was one of the major topics at both the 2012 Storage Visions Conference as well as the 2012 CES.  In this article I will give some observations on what the development of the cloud will mean to the balance of local vs. remote storage.

Increased storage efficiencies and storage capacities at data centers combined with higher bandwidth access and the use of flash memory based content delivery systems enable services such as YouTube, Facebook, iTunes, iCloud and various other multi-stream social networks, content access and remote storage services.  Some people claim that the rise of cloud based resources will lead to less local storage, but there are reasons that the opposite consequence may occur.

Although the amount of raw bandwidth available world wide is large the availability and cost of access at any given point in time can vary significantly, particularly for a mobile individual.  For that reason even thin client products with smaller screens (such as smart phones and tablets) accessing compressed content often benefit from prior content downloads when connections are good as well as caching and buffering of content to ensure good performance.  Thus the storage capacity either directly inside these devices or readily available to them will generally increase with time.  Intel and Micron’s recent announcement of 20 nm flash memory chips with 128 gigabit capacity will probably lead to a wave of tablets with up to 128 GB capacity within the next year—and I expect that the general storage capacity in these products will rise over the next year.

An interesting ecosystem of “personal cloud” devices such as the Seagate GoFlex Satellite or the Kingston Wi-Drive may provide additional WiFi accessible local storage for these thin client products—a feature that may be useful for a number of users.   These personal cloud devices may be further augmented by a second (or even third) generation of home and small business NAS storage devices from companies such as Buffalo, Hitachi GST, Iomega, Seagate, Western Digital that offer remote access from their internal storage and sometimes coupled with additional storage through a cloud provider.  These examples of small “private clouds” can be part of a hybrid cloud architecture. 

The number of cloud services and devices in these consumer hybrid clouds will probably require protocols for how these services and systems can work together on an ad hoc basis.  This leads us to project the rise of loose cloud federations that can share content and services to the consumer as available and as needed.  Content from one type of cloud may be cached or buffered into one of the others for greater accessibility as well as better performance.  Likewise remote storage will be used to provide disaster recovery of the most valuable consumer content while more transient or personal data is kept on the closer components in the cloud federation.

Ultrabooks were much discussed at the CES this year with good reason.  These thin lightweight devices provide greater creative capabilities than thin client tablets usually provide and they have more powerful processors and memory.  Although originally projected to be primarily flash memory based devices it is likely that the majority of the more popular models will probably contain a hard disk drive to keep the price at a point where these products will appeal to a majority of users. 

At the same time flash memory will likely be used in these devices to provide faster performance using either a dual drive configuration where frequently read content (such as applications software) is kept on a solid state drive (SSD) while user data is kept on a hard drive, or as a cache memory.  The cache memory approach uses flash memory as a non-volatile enhancement of faster DRAM memory.  Frequently used content is captured in the flash cache and read back instead of going to the slower hard drive to retrieve this content.  This increases the performance of the overall computer system.  Ultrabooks might even contain flash cache as well as flash dual storage combined with a hard disk drive in order to allow the drive to stay in a lower power state and giving some additional battery life.

So, although the cloud will provide enormous improvements in services and less expensive options for disaster recovery storage for consumers and other users it may not replace most local storage.  Universal connectivity with good quality high speed connections cannot be counted on and some content may not be put on a truly remote storage system due to privacy and sensitivity concerns. 

Thus the future seems to be one where we will see the growth of remote cloud storage and services enabled by developments in storage technology as well as the rise of more personal clouds to serve the needs of individual consumers and other users.  At the same time the growth in the amount and richness of content may lead to the growth of more cache and buffer storage in computers and consumer products as well as new types of storage tiering.  In this way the growth of content in the cloud(s) may contribute to further storage capacity on the ground.