The Past, Present, and Future of Storage Technologies (part 2 of 2)
Geoff Kuenning, Youjip Won, Ming Xin Zhao, Erez Zadok · ACM Transactions on Storage · 2025
The Past, Present, and Future of Storage Technologies (part 2 of 2)Any good research project begins with a "literature review"-a process of looking for papers relevant to a topic of interest, reviewing them to identify those more useful while discarding the rest, then looking for more papers, and repeating this process over and over until you feel you have reached some saturation point.That is the point when you're coming up against the same papers you have seen already (which we like to call the "transitive closure" point).This review stage is fairly time-consuming but also critical; in fact, many research papers get rejected for neglecting to cite important related work.Similarly, practitioners may run into roadblocks that they could have avoided if they had been aware of all the existing literature.So, are you a new graduate student or an employee at a company who is interested in innovating in a given storage technology?Do you wish you could find a single publication that would summarize (almost) everything there is to know about a specific technology?If so, this Special Issue (both parts) is hopefully for you because, unlike conference papers, our journal articles have no page limits and thus allow authors to discuss any technology with as much detail as needed and include a comprehensive bibliography for those interested in more.Incidentally, we found out that survey papers tend to get well cited and received.We believe this is because they become a "go to" source on a topic, thus saving the readers from having to read and cite many other papers.Authors of survey papers may see their articles cited over and over.In 2023, TOS's Editor-in-Chief ( EiC ) reached out to a few senior people to brainstorm ideas for special issues.Because putting together a special issue is a huge task, he recruited several Associate Editors (AEs) to help.We settled on an idea particularly suitable for journals: survey papers.And we decided to focus on the bottom of the storage stack: storage technologies and media.We also debated whether we should focus on futuristic technologies, current, or past ones.In the end, we opted to include everything: all storage technologies, regardless of their age or maturity, can teach us something useful.Normally, TOS authors submit their full manuscript for review.However, because this special issue's survey nature would likely mean longer papers, we wanted to provide better direction to authors.So, we posted a CFP asking the prospective authors to submit a short one-page abstract.We provided guidance to prospective authors as to what makes a good survey paper.Specifically, authors would have to survey many related papers in their chosen area, so as to make their survey the most comprehensive paper on the topic to date.Secondly, it was not enough to just summarize past papers; authors also needed to provide insight into why and how a given technology evolved over the years, and where it might go in the future.