The Future of Faster, Smaller Storage with Hybrid Solid-State and Spinning Media

Data storage technologies continue to evolve somewhat predictably, with the introduction of smaller and smaller drives holding more and more data. Solid-state media is part of the trend toward faster, smaller storage footprints.

“Over the next five years or so, the high performance sector of the storage industry is going to move toward solid state, non-spinning media,” predicted Alan Atkinson, president and CEO of Xiotech (News - Alert), during a TMCnet video interview with TMC’s CEO Rich Tehrani (News - Alert) at Cloud Expo 2011 in New York. 

Xiotech is at the forefront of this trend; it specializes in solid-state and hybrid storage solutions. The company’s claim to fame is a powerful algorithm, Continuous Adaptive Data Placement (CADP), making possible real-time adaptive data writes and reads using solid state and spinning media merged into a single image. 

CADP is the brain inside Xiotech’s Hybrid ISE solution; it quickly learns the relative merit of storing particular data on solid state or spinning disc, and adapts accordingly. Atkinson explained that when a Hybrid ISE box is first started up, it typically runs at around 10,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS). Four hours later, that increases to about 25,000 IOPS, and 12 hours later to about 60,000 IOPS.

“We deliver the capacity of disc, 14.4 terabytes per unit, with the speed of solid state, at a price that looks like disc,” Atkinson said.

He added that Xiotech takes a non-standard approach to the use of cache.

“Cache is like a set of shelves at the front of a warehouse,” he pointed out. “Everything that comes in goes on those shelves, and when those shelves are full you start throwing stuff in the back. Like everyone else, we use cache. But we view cache as separate from how we manage solid-state discs. Our approach allows you to get much better, sustainable performance.

The company’s approach involves writing all the data to disc, which allows the use of cheaper solid-state media (MLC instead of SLC), and overcomes the challenges inherent with slow write times for solid state (which is optimized for reads).

Atkinson sees solid state taking on even more of a role in data storage over the next half-decade or so.

“There is also a lot of growth in the archive space,” he noted. “That’s less of a performance story and more of a dollars per gigabyte story.”

For more about hybrid solid state/spinning media solutions, future developments planned by Xiotech, and customer bases for this technology, watch the full video interview.