IBM's futuristic storage aims for speed, density

IDG News Service - IBM is working on both super-fast and super-dense storage media that should reach enterprises before the end of this decade, and demand in some industries looks likely to keep pace with the advances.

The amount of data that enterprises have to deal with is growing so fast that they are coming up against power and space limits and grappling with how to manage the information, according to analysts, users and IBM officials at a press event that the company hosted in San Francisco on Wednesday.

IBM highlighted two futuristic technologies that researchers are exploring now to address separate challenges: how to make primary data available faster and how to pack archived information into a smaller space. For the former, the company is developing so-called "racetrack" storage, in which data is stored in different magnetic regions that travel over short, nano-scale wires when accessed. It may come on sale in five to seven years, according to Bruce Hillsberg, IBM's director of storage systems research. For the latter, researchers are using an unspecified magnetic technology that could store a petabyte of data in a standard 1U rack unit. Expect that in three years, Hillsberg said.

Storage Class Memory

IBM thinks "racetrack" technology will pave the way for Storage Class Memory, which will be nearly as fast as today's memory but be able to scale up to enterprise storage capacity. It's so dense that it could allow a portable music player to hold 500,000 songs.

With Storage Class Memory, the amount of space and power required to store large enterprise data sets could shrink dramatically by 2020. What would take 1,250 racks of hard disk drives today could be stored in one rack, with less than one-third the energy, Hillsberg said. The medium will also last longer than the flash SSDs (solid-state drives) now used for fast storage, he said.

A petabyte in a rack unit

The other device IBM is working on, which it called simply the "petabyte storage device," would be designed to store data for as long as 50 years without the need for migration to another medium, Hillsberg said. Moving content from one device to a newer generation of hardware costs money and time and can introduce record-keeping errors, he said.

Without giving more details about the device, Hillsberg said it would have some moving parts but not as many as a tape library, the typical solution for long-term archiving today. He envisions it being used not as a replacement for tape but in conjunction with it, possibly to provide access to archived data over a cloud infrastructure.