Storage news ticker – January 14

A Backblaze blog claims public cloud service provider data retention minimum periods are like a data deletion tax. “Let’s call retention minimums what they really are: delete penalties. We stand against delete penalties. We don’t charge them. We see them as the enemy of every use case in which data is intentionally replaced or deprecated in hours, days, or weeks instead of months.” AWS S3, for example, has minimum retention periods defined in pricing page footnotes. Other CSPs bury them deep inside their terms of service or FAQs. Backblaze says they should delete the delete penalties. 

The 2022 edition of the Flash Memory Summit is a live event scheduled for August 2–4 at the Santa Clara Convention Centre. FMS says it “offers the unique industry experience to explore the latest data storage standards, the newest innovations of memory technology and product advances to help attendees create the most competitive, high-performance storage solutions for on-premise datacentres and public cloud locations.” The program manager is Tom Coughlin (tom@tomcoughlin.com).

IDC has produced a v2 2021 Worldwide Edge Spending Guide looking at the 2020–2025 period. It defines the edge as “the technology-related actions that are performed outside of the centralized datacenter, where edge is the intermediary between the connected endpoints and the core IT environment. Characteristically, edge is distributed, software defined, and flexible.” Worldwide spending on edge computing is expected to be $176 billion in 2022 — an increase of 14.8 per cent over 2021. For enterprise adopters, the edge use cases with the largest investments in 2022 include manufacturing operations, production asset management, smart grids, omni-channel operations, public safety & emergency response, freight monitoring, and intelligent transportation systems.