As a comment to my post last month about hard drive speeds, Waldo made a comment about the potential impact of Solid State Drives (SSDs) to change the mainstream data storage paradigm.  I agree that SSDs have significant potential and will become increasingly important.  As computers become more ubiquitous:  more transportable, more hold-able, more wearable, etc., the benefits of solid state storage – lighter, smaller, more durable – will become more relevant.  In addition, SSDs are much faster that hard drives.

However, at the same time people will are using more and more data which will further expose the weakness of SSD:  their cost per unit storage is significantly higher that hard drives.

So how can you have the best of both worlds?  Imagine a mobile device, like a mobile phone or a laptop, with a SSD (or just a lot of solid state storage).  Now imagine that mobile device also has a high speed wireless data connection to a Dispersed Storage network.  In this approach, the SSD is a fast, huge storage cache while the dsNet provides massive, reliable secondary storage.  With this approach, you get fast access in a small, light and durable device while having access to unlimited storage on a dsNet.  And if you lost your mobile device, you could connect a new mobile device (or two or five) to you data on the dsNet and never lose a bit.

The pieces to put this together will all be available this year.  Anyone want to port the dsNet client to their phone?

Don’t get me wrong, getting old is not fun, but it does afford a certain perspective that only comes with being around for a while.  That’s sort of a good thing, I guess.  Being in one industry for a while you can definitely see innovation and progression, however, there are relatively few times when you get to witness revolutionary change.  Most of the time things tend to evolve…evolutionary change.

It would be hard to argue that the Information Technology and Data Processing has experienced significant change in the last 30 years.  There are countless examples of things we take for granted today that weren’t even conceived of a generation ago. 

The face of the IT industry has changed and changed again in that time frame.  When I entered the work force, all computing and data processing was performed by expansive systems that took up rooms of floor space, had to be cooled by water flow and had about the same processing capacity and memory as the laptop that I’m using today.  You had large expansive mainframe boxes that performed batch oriented jobs and very few humans interacted with computers at all. 

With the invention of the personal computer and client-server computing, IT and data processing broke out of the “glass house” and became the prevue of every human.  Networking advances connected all this computing power together and placed information, entertainment, and just about everything in our lives at our fingertips.  That’s revolutionary, it’s changed the world.

In storage, there have been significant changes as well, but one could argue again, that most of the changes have been evolutionary, not revolutionary.  Driven by areal densities, speed and recording capabilities of magnetic material and manufacturing efficiencies, the storage industry has seen its share of improvements but not at the level of other core elements of IT.

Look at today’s choices in the storage system market!  Probably the most significant invention in storage was RAID technology at the end of the last century.  Since then, most of the invention you’ve seen from the storage manufacturers is in the area of connectivity, capacity and performance.  Every storage vendor basically solves the problem the same way.  They build a box (an array) that is a collection of heads/controllers with interfaces (where most of the intelligence lies), a set of drives that operate collectively to provide capacity, performance and recovery from failure and some form of management software that is essential to operate and manage this stuff.  It’s not very exciting and not much invention - except some of the management techniques.

What we need is some revolutionary thinking, “outside the box” thinking similar to the days when data processing escaped the monolithic compute platforms and became accessible and usable by the majority.  Why should all critical information assets be stored on one box in one location, even if it’s copied to another box or tape cartridge for safe-keeping?  Why shouldn’t information be stored in such a way that it’s not only private and protected without replication but it’s easily accessible and distributable to humans that want to use it?