This article/video is part of the 2023 Electronic Design Technology Forecast issue.
The video above was a roundtable hosted by the SCSI Trade Association. It's led by Broadcom's Rick Kutcipal, who is a storage industry veteran expert and a member of the SCSI Trade Association. Also on the panel is Don Jeanette, a leading storage market analyst with TRENDFOCUS, and Patrick Kennedy, a prominent storage and server market influencer with ServeTheHome.
Some of the trends discussed include the continued utilization of SATA and SAS drives due to the existing ecosystem. However, the trend in servers is to use PCI Express (PCIe) with NVM Express (NVMe) because of the higher bandwidth needed for solid-state storage. The NVMe 2.0 standard is out now; other standards include NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF). Still, SAS will dominate in the nearline storage arena for now.
For nearline enterprise storage, hard-disk drives (HDDs) continue to address the bulk of storage (over 85%), with growing use of solid-state disks (SSD), which dispels any thoughts that HDDs are dead. They have disappeared from most mobile and PC systems, but they're the most cost-effective solution for nearline storage.
Enterprise and Data Center Standard Form Factor (EDSFF), M.2, U.2, E1, and E3/E3.S are changing the storage paradigm for systems (see figure). They leverage PCIe and NVMe to deliver high-speed non-volatile data storage, though one of the rising challenges is heat.
CXL also looms on the horizon for volatile and non-volatile storage.