The combined impact of 5G and associated edge compute deployments is having almost as profound an impact on data storage as on provision of mobile services, driving architectural and technology changes. These go beyond the impact of higher network bandwidth and capacity, which always have a knock-on effect on the storage systems behind the applications and services. The growth in real time applications, especially in the industrial realm, demands faster reading and writing of data to avoid that becoming a bottleneck, challenging or even obsoleting some established storage protocols or methods. For example, eMMC (embedded multimedia card), a popular embedded storage bus, has been widely deployed in smartphones, cheaper laptops and increasingly IoT devices, for permanent as opposed to working…