Big Brother Iron
Zuck and his Narcicissm Silo? Hah.
The singlest biggest customer will be State.
One wants to know the details of what happened ... when winter falls and you are having an interview while firmly attached to a chair, after all.
Cloud storage is hot, according to Meg Whitman, HP’s CEO, who spoke of her "excitement" in the Q2 results earnings call. Whitman said: I'm very excited about some of the innovations that we'll be rolling out in the second half of the year from our server, [cloud]* storage, technology services and converged systems team. We're …
"Gotta say, the idea of WORM flash cold storage isn't awful..."
In 1991 I put that idea to a bunch of silicon physicists/designers some of whom actually developed what is now called Flash. They thought it was a crap idea because Flash does actually have a time limit on how long it can store data (charge leaks, the substrate also accumulates charge and eventually you can't tell 1's from 0's). With MLC the rate of bit rot is higher too...
It would be a great if Zuck banks on flash for cold storage without bothering to double check the bit rot situation, in 10 years or so that slurped data will be gone & good riddance too it. ;)
Phase change memories may do better in this application, but please don't tell that to Zuck.
The size of cheap SATA disks just keeps getting bigger and bigger, and when they're used for archiving in a tiered storage design (and therefore not spinning all the time), they're not too costly on the electrickery, so why would the market move away from them? Flash is still too pricey and not really having large enough capacity to displace SATA, which is why most people I know who have flash only have it in smallish amounts for hot tables in tier1 database apps and the like, the rest being on spinning rust platters. 'Cold storage' just seems a rebranding for archiving, where the actual smart stuff is the software and not the hardware itself. Meg should know that, her salesgrunts keep boring me rigid with Data Protector and Autonomy slide sets.
Like Sony, HP have proved time and time again what a well run, customer-centric, leading edge company they really are. And Meg Whitman is clearly a visionary, saying things that no-one else in technology would dream of saying, and in an American voice too. If she can sell me some Automomy alongside whatever the hell she's banging on about this week, then I'm hooked.