Advances in data storage: Moving beyond the hard drive

Federal Tech Talk

Advances in data storage: Moving beyond the hard drive

VAST Data Federal's Gus Hunt and Randy Hayes join host John Gilroy on this week's Federal Tech Talk to discuss how improvements in data storage can increase access...

September 21, 2021 8:38 am

1 min read

Best listening experience is on Chrome, Firefox or Safari. Subscribe to Fed Tech Talk’s audio interviews on Apple Podcasts or PodcastOne.

This week on Federal Tech Talk, host John Gilroy spoke with Gus Hunt, board member, and Randy Hayes, vice president Public Sector for VAST Data Federal. The topic was how improvements in data storage can increase access and reduce long- term costs for federal agencies.

Gus Hunt & Randy Hayes, VAST Data Federal

This interview will introduce several new terms for federal information technology leaders. Most technical managers understand the basic concepts of hard drives. The overview is that the more volatile memory in each hard drive, the faster it can transfer data. The tradeoff is that, until recently, volatile memory has been expensive.

Hayes gave a terrific explanation of how technology like Non-Volatile Memory Express can be combined with “fabric” to take advantage of innovation to give federal data centers extremely fast memory that has incredible durability. VAST Data Federal is giving 10-year warranties for the memory systems it sells.

Hunt stated that AVAST is the fastest-growing data storage company in history. Listen to the interview to keep up with terminology like disaggregated storage networks — it may help in understanding advances in storage.