As technological innovations happen, it can be easy to forget that even the most complex systems rely on large networks of basic infrastructure to operate. At the most fundamental level, all tech products rely on effective data storage
But this is easier said than done. Each byte of data has to be stored somewhere, on a rack, disk, tape, or flash device. As the world embraces hardware and software that creates data at an even faster rate, businesses will be forced to push the frontiers of data storage and evaluate their data management strategies.
In this episode, Jane and Rory speak to Tom Coughlin, president and CEO of the IEEE, to learn more about how data storage will continue to evolve and what organizations can do to keep up with innovation in the space.
Highlights
“[T]he growth of data is what’s enabled things like machine learning to have the data to be able to train on so it’s a fundamental component of making that possible. And as the data has grown, as demand has grown for processing that data, that’s put requirements on data and memory, especially on memory’s side where you’re processing the data. You need a lot of it and it needs to be fast.”
“I suspect that the end result is going to be what it has been developing into, which is that if you’ve got your memory you’re using for immediate processing SSDs will be the primary storage for stuff that you need quickly, because there’s high read performance, but it wears out over time and it and it’s more expensive. That’s the big issue.”
“One thing it’s kind of interesting to keep in perspective is most of 2022 [and] most of 2023 was a real slump in the storage and memory market. And a lot of it had to do with recovery from COVID. During COVID, there were a lot of supply chain issues and a lot of data centers and enterprise storage companies basically bought a lot of stuff. It took them a while to consume that, so even though the requirements for data are growing it was basically not until the end of 2023 that we started to see recovery in the prices and these products.”
