More advances will be needed, because various trends are placing more stress on storage systems. While the demand for physical storage space rises constantly, increasingly powerful servers are also demanding more data serving capability.

"If you look at these new [Intel and AMD] processors they are like mainframes," Yoshida says. "They have power we didn't dream about five years or so ago."

Besides the sheer power of individual processors, servers are now made with many cores and host multiple virtual machines, potentially slowing down access to data.

"You have these different technology cycles that overlap each other," Yoshida says. "Sometimes the processors are ahead and sometimes the storage is ahead. Right now the trend is with the servers, and the way we use the servers, with multicore and hypervisors and virtual machines, is going to drown the storage systems."

Adapting storage systems to new standards such as will also be a challenge, Yoshida says.