Storage: What's in 'Store' for the Future

Friday, May 01, 2009

Print

Comment

Email

Digg

Del.icio.us

Reddit

Twitter

Storage of data is a mission critical task and shall always remain that way. There will always remain a need to find better solutions to store the ever growing volumes of data. Looking at the future of storage technologies that the industry is going to embrace, we discuss how file virtualization can play an important role in making enterprise data management easier with almost nil downtimes. Also, we crystal gaze to show how Nanotechnology shall drive storage management in future. We also focus on future storage media being developed on concepts like 3D holographic storage, carbon nanotubes and heat assisted magnetic recording, revealing how, in a few years, terabytes of data would be stored on a disk as small as a conventional DVD!

Nanotechnologies Driving Data Storage of Future
To put it in simple words, Nanotechnology deals with engineering of functional systems at the molecular scale. Generally, this deals with structures of the size 100 nanometers or smaller, and involves developing materials or devices within that size range. If mathematical conversions have not been your forte, a nanometer is a billionth part of a meter. More like a comparison of a marble with our planet.

Today, scientists are working day and night in order to develop systems that would shape the future of the data storage industry. These could help us do away with internal disk drives all together as well as the computer boot-up process, bringing up applications instantaneously when a PC or laptop is turned on. Other hardware may allow data to be stored for more than 100 years without having to change or refresh media. Moreover, such technologies bring along the potential for devices as small as flash drives to hold as much data in 10 years as the world's largest data centers held only 10 years ago.

RAM of the future
Carbon nanotubes lie at the heart of this concept. These are molecule-size objects composed entirely of carbon in a cylindrical structure which gives them unique properties. Some of these properties are steel like strength and conduction of electricity both as a metal and a semiconductor.

The core technology that goes behind Nanotube-based/non-volatile RAM.	3D holographic storage solutions can make terrabytes of data fit into a standard CD/DVD sized disk.

An interesting way in which carbon nanotubes are being used is in the development of a high density, nonvolatile random access memory chip that could replace dynamic RAM, flash memory and even hard drives. Nantero, a nanotechnology company has built, using nanotubes a chip called NRAM (for nanotube-based/nonvolatile RAM) that is faster than DRAM, as portable as flash memory, and able to provide permanent storage because the wafer uses nonvolatile storage as its basis. The technology has the potential to enable instant-on computers that boot and reboot without delays and eliminate the need for internal disk drives on computers.

Holographic Optical drives
3D optical data storage is an innovation which has the potential to provide TBs of data on a DVD sized disk. This is a form of optical data storage in which information is stored or read on the medium in a 3D resolution as compared to the 2D manner on the conventional CD/DVDs.

The left portion shows the conventional multigrain media, while the right portion shows the pattern media and the uniform arrangement of magnetic islands.

Colossal Storage is developing a rewritable 3-D volume holographic removable disk media. The nanotechnology under development at Colossal is a possible replacement for today's magnetic disk drives and memory chips. Unlike magnetic media, which only stores data on the surface of the disk drive, holographic optical disk drives use two or more laser beams that work with one another to read and write data throughout the disk media. Advantages include 100+TB capacities, near zero read and write response times and 100-plus year lifespan.

Unlike AFM (Atomic force microscope)-based storage nanotechnologies, which require two dissimilar materials to come into contact with each other and create friction and shorten a disk media's lifespan, holographic storage has noncontact surfaces, so it has a higher degree of reliability. Therefore users will have to invest in a disk media once and won't be forced into continually reinvest in new storage technologies.

Bit Patterned Media
The hard drive manufactures are vying for maximum areal density and storage capacities for their drives. Bit areal density is considered to a benchmark to measure progress in magnetic information recording technology. With Seagate being able to achieve 375 GB of storage density into a single platter to become the first to break the 1TB hard drive barrier with their Barracuda 7200.11 1.5 TB hard drive. But to scale the conventional magnetic recording technology to increase the areal densities pose a challenge in form of superparamagnetic effect. To counter this, researchers are working on Bit Patterned Media concept which will help achive a terabit per square inch densities and beyond. The hard drives today use the conventional magnetic recording technology, in which the magnetic recording layer is a thin film of magnetic alloy. This magnetic alloy film forms a random mosaic of nanometer scale grains that behave as independent magnetic elements. Where each recorded bit is made up of several of these random grains. However with bit patterned media, the magnetic layer is created as an ordered array of highly uniform islands of grains for each individual bit of recorded information. Research is being done to realize the disk fabrication for such uniformly placed nanometer sized magnetic grains and also the overall recording medium to read and write the data onto the drives.

Page(s)   1  2