The Future of Data Storage

With data increasing exponentially day by day  we need technologies and

devices to store the same. There are lots of speculations around as to what new

technologies will emerge in the near future and how will they impact data

storage as a whole. An average company's data storage need grows triple every 2

years, an average person's data storage requirements grow 500 megabytes per year

(and growing catastrophically), and  75% of all IT spending goes for data

storage. Such is the requirement and more for storage. Let's look ahead to the

technologies that we might see in the near future to satiate the  escalating

need of data storage.

Five-dimensional data storage



Researchers have developed a 5-dimensional optical material capable of

storing data in three spatial dimensions in response to different wave lengths

and polarization of laser light. The material is made up of layers of gold

nanorods suspended in clear plastic spun flat on a glass substrate. Gold

nanorods respond to much narrower bands of laser light. Up to 6 different

patterns have been registered on the same area using 3 different wavelengths

and  two polarizations of light without interfering with each other. Storage

density of 1.1 terabytes per cubic centimeter can be achieved by writing data to

stacks of as many as 10 nanorod layers with recording speeds of about a gigabit

per second .The writing laser melts and reshapes the gold particles, which are

less than 100 nanometers long. The changes affect how the nanorods interact with

light from a laser-imaging system, allowing the data to be read.  The response

of the nanorods, which are scattered throughout the plastic randomly, also

depends on the angle of propagation of the incoming light. The patterns can't be

erased and rewritten, but they should be stable over time. The first application

is likely to be in archives where large amounts of data from medical imaging

files, security encoding, and banking are stored. But this is not something

which we are going to see very soon.

Racetrack memory

Racetrack memory



Nanowires can be used to create an ultra-dense memory chip with the huge storage
capacity of a magnetic hard drive, the durability of electronic flash memory,

with speed superior to both, while avoiding their drawbacks. An array of

U-shaped magnetic nanowires arranged vertically can theoretically pack 100 times

as much data into the same area as a flash-chip transistor. The nanowires have

regions with different magnetic polarities, and the boundaries between the

regions represent 1s or 0s, depending on the polarities of the regions on either

side. When a spin-polarized current (one in which the electrons'

quantum-mechanica­l "spin" is oriented in a specific direction) passes through

the nanowire, the whole magnetic pattern is effectively pushed along, like cars

speeding down a racetrack. At the base of the U, the magnetic boundaries

encounter a pair of tiny devices that read and write the data. Data can be

written and read in less than a nanosecond. Racetrack memory using hundreds of

millions of nanowires would have the potential to store vast amounts of data.

There are no mechanical parts, so it could prove more reliable than a hard

drive. Racetrack memory can store information even when the power is off as no

atoms are moved in the process of reading and writing data, eliminating wear on

the wire. Moreover, chips with huge data capacity could be shrunk to

unimaginably small sizes. Moving 10 bits along the nanowire would make racetrack

memory competitive with flash storage. If movement of 100 bits could be

achieved, racetrack could replace hard drives. The challenges in this regard are

to manufacture narrower and more uniform wires from materials that would allow

the magnetic domains to move quickly along the wires with least amount of

electrical current possible. We might see some prototypes of this technology in

a couple of years.

Heating Up magnetic memory



Heat-assisted magnetic recording involves blasting the magnetic regions of a

disk with heat to make it possible to use as a more stable recording media. It

should make it possible to record data at densities 50 times greater than will

be possible when today's technologies reach their limits. Blasting more

magnetically stable grains with a short pulse of heat makes it much easier to

flip them. When the media cools down again, the data is "frozen”. The heat is

provided by a rapid laser blast that must be focused down to a spot, the size of

an individual grain, less than 100 nanometers in diameter. This requires a new

generation of optics that work in what's known as the near field. A

magnetic-writing head outfitted with near-field optics to write data to a hard

disk coated with stable recording media is being worked on to achieve the

desired result. Recording data at densities of 250 gigabits per square inch have

been registered, which could be increased for major impact. Reduction in the

size of the light to about 20 nanometers and integration of an electronic

controlled laser into a hard drive would go far towards making this tech a

reality.

Source: www.ibm.com

Grid-Oriented Storage



In support of future generation of data storage in the grid era, a new

concept of Grid-Oriented Storage (GOS) comes up . A GOS device incorporates all

the capabilities of the earlier NAS/SAN devices, but is a new device suitable

not only for Internet communication but also for grid communication. A GOS

device is a cheap file server; basically a disk drive or disk array with another

board that connects it directly to the grid. The key technologies to be

developed in the project will establish repositories for data that can be shared

among multiple processors and multiple end users on the grid. GOS products fit

the thin-server categorization, with re-developed and simplified operating

system, and can accelerate tenfold the access to data on the Internet/Grid.

'Millipede'-Nanoscale mechanical data storage



Touted as the next advancement in terms of data storage for a while now, the

'Millipede' project still  waits to see the light of the day.  Millipede is a

non-volatile computer memory stored on nanoscopic pits burned into the surface

of a thin polymer layer, read and written by a MEMS-based probe. It promises a

data density of more than 1 terabit per square inch which is about 4 times the

density of magnetic storage available today. The Millipede system provides high

data density, low seek times, low power consumption and, probably, high

reliability. This technology would indeed be more expensive per MB than the

current prevailing technologies, but this disadvantage would be masked by the

sheer massive storage quantity provided which is more than any thing present or

proposed. Usage scenarios predominantly involve high capacity hard drives but

due to the small form factor devices like watches, mobile phones and personal

media systems could also be using the Millipede very soon.

It is quite possible that by the time this information reaches you, research

on many new technologies would have started. Data storage is ever increasing and

improving and with it, is improving the way the world looks at technological

advancements to provide solutions. One thing is for sure. One cannot consider

himself a third party person in this tussle. We as users are very much a part of

this ongoing battle of the storage problem and the storage  technology battling

it out in a battle of oneupmanship.

Shikhar Mohan Gupta