Reply to post: An era ends, another era begins (this is tech after all)

An era ends, another era begins (this is tech after all)

An era started when we chose to network block storage by putting Fibre Channel under the host's SCSI software stack. So SANs and Fibre Channel disk arrays came to be. iSCSI chose to extend this to Ethernet.

As flash storage became cost effective, and found the legacy SCSI stack too slow, we got NVMe over Fabric. Right now these are more extensions of local disks (think networked SAS storage) than they are storage systems in the model of Fibre Channel. Will be interesting to see how this plays out, particularly if Omni-Path takes hold in the data center.

Looking further out in time, the whole nonvolatile memory in the server DIMM slots as storage thing is still taking shape, on multiple fronts. I'll leave device technology, where I have no expertise, to the device technologists noting that they're all chasing the tens of billions of US$/year which the "brass ring" of becoming the DRAM replacement would bring.

On the product front, best and highest use of this technology requires repartitioning work at the basic boundary between hardware and software, with the current partitioning of products between "server", "SAN", and "storage system" as collateral damage. This is where flash was 14 years ago when the first flash-array vendor came to us and presciently told us how flash would take over storage...about 10 years ahead of when it did. I think there will be a similar race, with the usual wasteful VC funding of me-too startups starting perhaps 5 years from now, after the core technology foundation is better laid. Will be interesting to see how much ends up open source, how much is driven by the big Internet players, and how much follows the traditional commercial model.

So yes, venture investment in the earlier era ought to ebb and be very focused now. But there will be another wave.

Oh, and the storage business evolves glacially. We'll still be finding new customers for today's era products a decade from now, and still selling them two decades from now. An "abrupt" shift in storage buying patterns takes a decade.