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Departmental Colloquium

Understanding NAND Flash and its Role in the Enterprise Storage Hierarchy

George Totolos

Netapp, Inc.

Thursday October 1, 2009
12:00 pm - SENSQ 5317

Hosted by Sangyeun Cho

Abstract

Solid state memory is garnering a lot of attention by IT professionals who believe this technology will improve the performance of their storage subsystems. Hard disk drives have dominated the primary storage of computer systems for many decades. Although hard drives have been riding down an impressive cost curve, their mechanical limitations have prevented their performance from keeping pace with CPU and DRAM technologies. This imbalance has traditionally been solved by using RAID to add more hard drives until performance goals were met. Unfortunately, this usually meant that the final solution ended up costing more money and consuming more power and rack space than was really necessary. NAND flash memory is shaping up to be the first technology to truly challenge the dominance of disk drives. Having graduated from digital cameras and MP3 players, NAND flash is finding its way into a variety of enterprise-class storage products. This presentation will describe how NAND flash works and what challenges face the engineer who designs with them. It will also present a view of the enterprise storage hierarchy as it will likely be shaped by the arrival of this disruptive technology.

Biography of Speaker

George Totolos is a Principal Hardware Engineer at Netapp, Inc., responsible for research and development of enterprise storage systems at their Pittsburgh Technology Center. He received a BSEE from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an MSEE from Columbia University. With over 20 years of experience in the computer hardware and networking industries, George has developed mainframe memory boards at IBM, ATM networking ASICs at FORE Systems, and a variety of storage solutions at Netapp. He has filed 16 patents in the fields of computer and networking architecture and is currently focused on solid state storage in the enterprise.

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