IBM labs talk about storage

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IBM issued a press release yesterday talking broadly about some of their storage innovations work. It’s worth a quick peruse. One highlight that caught my attention as an iPod-toting, iPhone carrying, MacBook lugging dweeb

IBM logoWithin the next ten years, “racetrack” memory, so named because the data “races” around the nanoscale wire “track,” could lead to solid state electronic devices — with no moving parts, and therefore more durable — capable of holding far more data in the same amount of space than is possible today.  For example, this technology could enable a handheld device such as an mp3 player to store about 500,000 songs or 3,500 movies, 100-times what is possible today with far lower cost and power consumption.

Yeah…give me some of that. In case you are wondering, yes, the post does talk about technology that you might care about in HPC.

As servers become larger and faster, our disks and their capacities are also becoming bigger. Meanwhile, components are getting smaller and speedier–creating more IT heat density. Reducing the energy consumption of IT systems is a major challenge. Until now, power management for storage systems has been limited, but this is all changing.  After intensive studies of the factors that affect power usage in storage systems, IBM researchers have developed new algorithms and models that are being incorporated into IBM capacity planning tools to estimate the power consumption of different storage controller components for various workloads characteristics. These technologies are targeted at helping SMBs, archives, and enterprises better manage their storage power resources.

So there.