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Solid State Storage:
Making the skies more
friendly
Solid state storage (SSS) is a data storage technology made from Flash memory chips instead
SSDI SNIA
of spinning metal platters or streaming tape. There’s much debate about how fast and to
what extent SSS will be adopted into the broad range of commercial applications.
By Khaled Amer, Chair of SSS TWG Performance and Benchmarking Committee, and Neal
Ekker, Vice Chair SSSI Education Committee and VP Texas Memory Systems.
Thoughtful industry observers point out that a key ingredient (AVOD) and personal televisions (PTVs) that provide airliner
to the adoption of any new technology lies in finding and passengers with channels ranging from movies and pre-
articulating examples where the technology solves “real recorded news to music and video games.These new IFEs
world” problems at a down-to-earth cost. In the case of SSS, enable passengers to make their choices and watch movies
maybe it’s time to look to the skies. separately, without delays.They can pause, rewind, fast-
forward, or stop a program that they have been watching.
In-flight entertainment (IFE) systems may furnish good
examples to illustrate where SSS offers real advantages in Upgrading IFE systems from non-interactive to AVOD with
real world enterprise environments. Commercial airline digital PTVs for every passenger certainly makes the skies much
audio/visual entertainment solutions must perform well on more friendly and entertaining. However, data storage system
aircraft while operating under severe restrictions in weight, weight, size, power consumption, and sensitivity to vibrations
size, and power consumption. Hard disk drives (HDDs) pose serious technical challenges. IFEs often provide services
contribute significantly toward these problems. HDDs are to hundreds of passengers on a single aircraft.When the
also not very suitable for handling the vibrations of an aircraft streams of all these services are multiplexed together, the
environment. It may be that the advantages offered by SSS access pattern at the storage device looks like a combination
are exactly those needed to make the skies a friendlier place, of random access (various streams sharing time slices) and
at least more media rich and responsive. sequential access (each stream taking turns reading a block of
its video stream).Tape-based storage would be unable to
Up In the Air: Problems with streaming media 7 miles high respond in any acceptable timeframe to such large queues of
IFE systems have come a long way in the last 10 years. Some data requests, so IFEs have moved toward HDDs to address
industry experts expect that around 70% to 80% of 100+ storage needs. But HDDs don’t fly particularly well in this
seat aircraft will have some type of IFE by the year 2011, a environment, on the ground or in the air. Using mechanical
nearly 50% increase from 2008. IFE systems typically offer moving parts makes them unsuitable due to the issues
very little interactivity, and passengers must be grouped mentioned above (weight, size, power consumption, and
together to watch a movie.You’ll wait up to 15 minutes after sensitivity to vibrations).To make things worse, to meet the
making your selection.The data storage system is the culprit; performance requirements of all the passengers using AVOD
waiting this long reduces the amount of concurrent video and video games concurrently, it is necessary to use multiple
streams coming out of the storage. HDD arrays which become a main contributor to the weight
of these systems (some weigh as much as 2,268 kilograms).
A new generation of IFE provides audio/video on demand Flash Fits Well in the Fuselage
SEPT 09 WWW.SNS-UK.CO.UK
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