Storage Innovation Keeps Delivering Surprises

Storage is a fun industry to write about, and one reason is the pace of innovation -- which is fast and picking up speed. A lot of new technology is hitting the market, and there is more on the way. Despite an out-of-date image held by those who don't have to buy, deploy, and manage storage technology, it is clear storage is anything but boring. Dare I call it "exciting"?

It may be that basic tasks like backup and disaster recovery have been around so long that those working in other parts of the company -- or even other parts of IT -- think that not much has changed in storageland. They still think it's all about tapes and disks. But those who are paying attention know that things have changed in a big way.

The list of interesting and potentially important technical developments is long and getting longer: solid-state storage; storage virtualization; data deduplication; cloud storage; file virtualization; Fibre Channel over Ethernet; online backup and disaster recovery... and those are just the technologies already on the market in one form or another.

And it isn't just products. Storage managers are looking at new strategies and tactics that are designed to resolve some of the more intractable problems faced by the growing demand to store more data and to make that data instantly accessible to more people for longer periods of time. Add to that the work in development labs and universities as researchers continue to explore fundamental technologies that have the potential to transform business technology as we know it today.

I was reminded of this when reading about the announcement from the National Science Foundation that a team of scientists has stored data for nearly two seconds in the nucleus of an atom. At first I was unimpressed -- what good is storage that lasts only two seconds? But the NSF called it "ultimate miniaturization of computer memory" and a key step in the development of quantum computers.You can't backup your hard disk to an atom just yet. But, if the NSF is right, this is a big step forward. Here is how they explained it:

The research was funded in part by the NSF and will be described in detail this week in the journal Nature. Scientists working on the team that reported the accomplishment came from Princeton University , University of Oxford , and the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories . They used both the electron and nucleus of a phosphorous atom embedded in a silicon crystal, and both the electron and nucleus behaved as tiny quantum magnets capable of storing quantum information.

If that isn't futuristic enough for you, how about "nanostructured storage domains"? A report in Science Daily tells us that a team of German and Italian researchers are trying to increase storage capacity using nanopatterns of a spin-transition compound on silicon oxide chips. The development could lead the way to molecular storage media that stores data by the "switching" the spin of electrons.

The breakthrough was reported by scientists, led by Massimiliano Cavallini at the National Research Council in Bologna, Italy, and Mario Ruben at the Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe in Germany, in the journal Angewandte Chemie. As storage managers know, data requires a unique "address" for each location that can be identified by the writing and reading units. This, in turn, requires an interface that makes the nanoscopic spin-state transitions of the molecular switching units compatible with the microscale instrument environment. This is possible if the spin-transition compound can be put into a highly ordered micro- or nano-structure, according to the report. This team has achieved that and produced readable logic patterns with a spin-transfer compound. Now they have to make it work in room-temperature conditions.I love this kind of stuff. It may be a bit too much like science fiction for many folks, and it is pretty clear that you won't be able to buy quantum or nano storage any time soon to back up your Exchange server. But the main point is that storage innovation is alive and well and continues to produce big (or potentially big) changes that have the potential to transform the industry and the way we store data.

This industry may have its best and most interesting years ahead of it. And sometimes it is hard to imagine the direction it might travel. After all, you can now buy a terabyte of storage for a couple of hundred bucks and stick it in your pocket. What will we be able to do when we can store data in an atom?