How broadcasters survive and thrive in future markets will depend not only on their ability to create, aggregate and brand unique digital content, but also on how effective they are in making strategic decisions about where and how their content is stored. In today’s connected economy, it will be crucial to be able to quickly repackage and deploy content to new markets.
The required business and creative decisions will need to be managed by an integrated set of ASPs supporting micro-payments, advertising and subscription models. If a content owner can’t perform these creative and business functions economically and rapidly, the competition will.
What is Next?
Look first for SSD accelerators initially to be added to larger storage systems. This will allow users to realistically increase application speeds by a factor of three, and increase burst Web apps acceleration rates by 40 times.
In the second stage of the storage revolution, SSDs will be added to notebooks,allowing them to run fasterand provide longer battery life. Initially, SSD-equipped PCs will cost more and, therefore appeal to a small subset of the notebook market, but prices will drop.
Consumer SSD-equipped PCs will cost more and, therefore appeal to a small subset of PC market, but prices will drop.
Consumer SSDs have actually been used in high end laptops since 2007. Unfortunately, technology market acceptance has been slow because of poorly designed notebooks. In many cases, mediocre SSDs were simply dropped into motherboards, which had been designed for hard discs. In nearly all commercial notebooks snipped up to the beginning of 2011, notebook chipsets wasted most of the theoretical speed advantagesof SSDs. It will require several more products generations of notebooks before the real advantages of SSDs will become obvious to users.
In 2015-2019 we will see an entirely new class of SSDs. I call this product class bulk storage, and these SSDs will replace hard discs in the data center. They will offer higher storage density than HDs, lower operating costs and faster performance. Internally, these SSDs will have different architectures, which will be optimized for low power consumption, data healing and long operating life rather than just low speed.
In many ways the software architecture of tomorrow’s bulk storage SSD rack will more resemble that of tape libraries. Instead of a robot mechanism grabbing a tape catridge, some sections of the SSD will simply be powered down and then powered up only when the information is needed. Another key factor in this scenario – the atomic data interchange between the bulk SSD and its neighbour, the auxiliary acceleration SSD (which sits on the SAN) – will by today’s standards be a huge chunk of data. This data will sit 2 levels away from the main acceleration SSDs and appear as a DAS connection to the applications.
In tomorrow’s data-driven content factory, storage will be regarded as a profit center and not an overhead. The ability to redeploy content quickly along with micro accounting will create new revenue opportunities for content owners. This will include the ability to manufacture (customize) the new content through software agents to prepopulate anticipated user demands and fully embrace any content, anywhere at any time business model.
Going forward, storage architectures will remain just as complicated as they have always been, with several classes of SSDs being optimized for different roles. A key difference, however, will be that the only spinning devices in the storage cabinets will be the cooling fans.