On the Diversity of Memory and Storage Technologies

Abstract: The last decade has seen tremendous developments in memory and storage technologies, starting with Flash Memory and continuing with the upcoming Storage-Class Memories. Combined with an explosion of data processing, data analytics, and machine learning, this led to a segmentation of the memory and storage market. Consequently, the traditional storage hierarchy, as we know it today, might be replaced by a multitude of storage hierarchies, with potentially different depths, each tailored for specific workloads. In this context, we explore in this "Kurz Erkl\"art" the state of memory technologies and reflect on their future use with a focus on data management systems.