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It was only a few weeks ago that the announcement of the SandForce purchase of LSI was topping SSD news world wide and today we find ourselves attending the LSI Accelerated Innovations Summit (AIS) in Silicon Valley itself.
This years AIS took place in Silicon Valley where some of the worlds largest corporations gathered to discuss such things as the emergence and integration of solid state drives into todays data centers along with strategies to help companies improve the performance and efficiency of their own systems.
In listening to key notes from Dr. Dileep Bhandarker, Chief Architect GFS, Microsoft, Mike Chenery Senior fellow, Enterprise Storage Solutions, Microsoft as well as that of LSI’s Abhi Talwalkar himself, I can for the first time step back and state that hard drives aren’t going anywhere. In fact, even without the recent flooding in Thailand which is driving some consumer HDD prices up 300%, the storage industry simply cannot keep up with the amount of data storage necessary in the next few years.
Lets qualify that if we can….
An IDC white paper has estimated that 1800 Exabytes (EB) of data is created, captured and replicated in a single year. How large is an exabyte? It’s one quintillion bytes of course. Lets look at it from a bit of a different angle as was shown by Mike Chenery:
1GB = 30 feet of books on a shelf
1TB = 300 hours of good quality video
1PB = Walmart entire database is 2.5 petabytes
1EB = all the words ever spoken by mankind times five
1ZB = In 2011 IDC estimates 1.8 ZB created and replicated worldwide
1YB = One yottabyte would take 1000 billion years to download 1 yottabyte file
Ok I had to dig here. What the heck is a yottabyte? Gizmodo helped! A yottabyte is one septillion bytes and it would take a data center the size of Rhode Island to contain this data and the cost of such a facility? You got it…. a mere $100 trillion.
The simple fact is that we are overtaking the storage industry and, at the rate we are going, we just might run out of storage one day. Who could have figured?
I know…I know… What about the SandForce acquisition right? Many are tagging along waiting for that big scoop, that which is not spoken of as of yet, and I have to let you down by stating any word of the LSI/SandForce merger is being held close to the heart. The excitement here is undeniable though. 2012 is going to be a BIG year in storage. The first mention of 12Gb/s came to light on the date of our departure with LSI’s announcement of there new 12Gb/s SAS expander which is probably a year ahead of its time given todays technological footprint.
Follow along in the next few days as we give you front row seats with us at AIS and what I see as a first look at the changing face of LSI. Stay tuned as we walk you through the Technology Showcase, lectures, panel discussions as well as behind the scene conversations with attendees and employees of LSI.
