At a company event held in Sydney, CEO David Flynn and chief scientist Steve Wozniak explained that the cost advantage of HDDs will remain, which will position them as low cost data backup devices.
"You can still use disk drives for low speed archival storage, not the stuff the enterprise data centers need," Wozniak said.
Not surprisingly, Wozniak believes that every future server will rely on NAND flash-based storage, but the sheer amount of data that is being generated will need the support of hard drives, which is certainly good news for HDD makers, even if Seagate or WD are not really concerned about the future of their HDD business.
According to an article published by ZDNet, Fusion-io pronounced its strategy to treat flash memory storage much more like memory and exploit its higher density to gain an advantage over the much less dense DRAM. While flash cannot match the performance of DRAM, it can serve as an extension. Fusion-io announced back in July a new technology that was developed in cooperation with researchers at Princeton university, which uses flash as a DRAM repository for rarely accessed pages and an indirect increase of the DRAM capacity in a system.
