The article about DNA molecule being a very efficient replacement for the hard disk or SSD, drew immediate attention from Ruben Spruijt, CTO at Atlantis Computing. Especially the fact that the information storage density is a million times more efficient than a hard disk or SSD, is what makes it interesting. Since speed, price and availability are challenges that we have to deal with now. Unfortunately, the application of the DNA molecule is too early at this time in order to comply with the immense storage needs of today. So the question remains: How do we solve the exponential growth in storage needs now and for the coming years? Both in business and private we store more and more data. With more and more sensors, 4K / 8K content, social media, digitization in the workplace, the need for storage capacity is tremendous. Even cars now carry a bit to add to the hunger of storage capacity.

For consumers it is almost normal to have more than three Internet-connected devices. These generate data which is stored both locally and in data centers. In addition, the storage needs of enterprises is also huge. Think of a hospital which now has a complete digital environment. High definition scanning and digital files should be available soon and for a long time. In the Air Force, for example and in the agricultural sector drones are used for research, resulting in an explosion of data. And financial institutions cracking their heads on how to deal with increasing growth of digital data. We see a clear hockey stick effect when it comes to the growth of storage needs, but unfortunately the budget of many organizations to fulfill this need, remains the same or even decreases. In addition, traditional storage vendors do not seem fast enough to fill the huge gap between need and budget. Intelligent hardware and software solutions and thinking differently is needed here.

The capacity of the hard disk to store data, which has been developed for the first time in 1953, is still in motion. Thus Trendfocus predicts that traditional hard drives within a few years have a capacity of 20 TB. The challenge herein is I/O density, because larger storage capacity leads to a decrease in the performance per GB or TB. Due to the low cost and high capacity of the hard disk it is increasingly used as a backup and archive solution, other than a solution that can provide capacity and fast performance. And application performance and business agility is precisely where the customer asks for.

In order to be able to meet the demand for all of the applications to have sufficient capacity and correct performance, other solutions are needed. Software Defined Storage (SDS) combined with Solid State Technology (flash) is an attractive option for this. Large growth in the market is to be expected in the flash memory. Would not it be nice if flash is available and affordable for all applications in the workspace, data center or public cloud? This is possible when smart software is added to commodity server and storage hardware to make more effective use of the flash capacity, manage high availability and harness the power of powerful processors and memory resources. Solid state technology is definitely the future, the performance is high and energy consumption low. By making use of smart storage software, flash is payable today for all applications and use. Step out of your comfort zone and see what possibilities there are to address the storage and performance challenges today. "Outside your comfort zone is where the magic happens."