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Storage trends for taming the flood of data

More than Meets the Eye

Article from ADMIN 83/2024

By Ariane Rüdiger

The Open Compute Project, Microsoft's data storage on glass, and standardized protocol structures for the IoT era are pioneering open storage technologies for future-proof hardware and software that make storage systems more durable, more manageable, and easier to repair.

The unabated growth of data that requires higher density data carriers has made storage one of the most exciting IT topics. Hard disks and solid-state disks (SSDs) have to be replaced every five years or so, creating mountains of electronic waste. Most of these components end up in the shredder for data protection reasons. Microsoft, for example, claims that it scraps millions of hard drives every year, which is not compatible with the company's ambitious environmental goals of offsetting all carbon emissions completely in just a few years. This goal is unlikely to occur without improved storage. The proposed solution is Microsoft glass. Another solution proposed by the Italian protocol manufacturer ZettaScale is the Zenoh data protocol.

Old Tech

Tape, although considerably more durable than hard disks, SSDs, and flash drives, doesn't really have much of an effect for long-term storage – at least not when compared with truly long-term approaches to storing knowledge such as books, microfiche, or (as an extreme example) hieroglyphics, which are legible for thousands of years because they are carved in stone or other permanent media. What's more, physical destruction of hard disks no longer offers any guarantee of rendering the data unreadable. On the contrary, it is already possible today to regenerate data even from the tiniest hard disk remnants. Therefore, improved methods or more secure storage media are urgently needed.

Another problem on the protocol side is the large numbers of what can be high-volume, roundabout requests and data transports required for applications such as industrial Internet of Things (IoT) or autonomous transport. Because of today's protocol structures, the overall system always needs to know where to find the required data. If the data is elsewhere, the request first passes through many routers to its destination. All told, this generates massive overhead,

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