Not that much of the future but what can I promise you from EMC in 2012?
More.
A lot more in some cases, a bit more in others. I’ve seen the product pipeline, out until the start of 2014 for some and while situations in specific and the market at large changes, what won’t change is the fact that there is more coming.
Next year there will be something for everyone in the audience.
And next year isn’t that far away.
Now. Lets you and I speculate for a moment. I’m of the opinion that NAND Flash is going to be with us well into 2017/2018 before it’s superseded by another solid state technology.
Why that long? Because it takes that long to build an entirely new architecture and deliver it in volume to support whatever comes next.
But before what comes next, ignore the hype of pretenders to Flash’s throne. No replacement technology is close to shipping in a meaningful volume. There’s specific ideas out there being floated as being “just a few years away” which I heard were “just a few years away” when I was in college more than a decade ago. We’re still waiting but I’m not complaining. Turning sand into storage takes a while to get right.
For the rest of this decade you’re going to use NAND Flash everywhere, and everyone will deliver it packaged as everything over the next few years if they’re not doing it already today.
Used as server cache, used as array cache, used as server storage, used as array storage, used for metadata acceleration, used for whatever. It’s just going to be used and used in volume, packaging be damned.
Assuming a Flash successor does make itself known it’ll be the end of the decade before the operating system vendors and the system builders will embrace it as part of a new technology direction. Which might not be entirely compatible with how we’ve been doing things to date. A lot of the technologies being floated are not interface compatible with current technology.
But nothing is going to happen until it’s clear to everyone what this superseding technology will be.
So until that moment, where it’s apparent to everyone that a specific technology is the next big thing, NAND Flash will remain both the present and the future of storage media layer technology for the next decade.
