Data growth and performance demand push Indian flash SSD market

IT market research agency IDC says use of solid state storage (SSS) in conjunction with solid state drives (SSDs) will play a vital role in transforming performance as well as use cases for enterprise application data.

IDC in April 2013 said all-SSS array market will reach $1.2 billion in revenues by 2015.

Increasing data growth, ongoing budgetary commitments, and increasing performance demands on IT infrastructure pose prominent challenges to datacenters today.

“Enterprise Flash storage technology promises a balanced solution. However, the full capability of Flash to economically raise service levels is yet to be realized. This is predominantly because of the unfamiliarity of datacenters with Flash technology and ongoing notions of increasing complexity and cost attached with it,” said Amit Malhotra, head, Systems Business, Oracle India.

Amit Malhotra of Oracle

Oracle has already addressed this issue by cultivating innovative data management software that helps businesses realize all benefits of Flash in strong new ways.

SSD market growth in India

The SSD market in India is still finding its way and is piloting mostly by the corporate segment and professionals. Price of SSDs has dipped in the last few years, but they still command a hefty premium over HDDs.

However, the consumer storage market is growing with the increased use of social media, digital convergence, improved broadband internet connectivity and the launch of 3G / 4G services. There has been a consistent increase in the demand for external storage devices including hard drives and portable flash memory products due to the staggering growth in digital content.

Despite the reduced prices, storage continues to the catalyst of IT management strategy. This domain is becoming increasingly crowded, and consumers have more options compared to a year ago. While disk drives are increasing their storage capacity, speed manufacturers and users are shifting to Solid State Drives.

SSD market

Additionally, pricing declines in the underlying SSD media are dropping the system dollar per GB prices, making the high-performance storage technology more affordable and appealing to a broader storage market, said IDC.

“Traditional disk technology has not kept pace with CPU technology, resulting in a significant performance gap between storage and computing. This shortfall in performance presents a huge opportunity for solid state storage to fill the void in terms of both input / output operations per second (IOPS) and latency,” said Dan Iacono, research director, Storage Systems at IDC.

Samsung

In August 2014, Samsung announced it has started mass producing a new SAS-interface solid state drive (SSD) using 10-nanometer (nm) class MLC NAND flash memory.

Jeeho Baek, vice president, memory marketing, Samsung Electronics, said: “We are committed to providing storage customers with an exceptionally wide variety of next-generation, high-capacity SSDs in driving the fast-growing enterprise storage SSD market.”

In the near future, Samsung plans to introduce next-generation SAS SSDs to further enhance its SAS SSD line-up and add considerably to its presence in the enterprise SSD market.

Single-level cell (SLC) and multi-level cell (MLC) Flash memory have similar design. MLC Flash devices are cost efficient and allow higher storage capacity. SLC Flash devices give faster write performance and better reliability, even at temperatures above the operating range of MLC Flash devices.

While MLC flash has high storage and low cost per bit, SLC flash shows endurance, low power consumption, can write and erase speed and endurance. Thus, SLC Flash is more suited for embedded systems and MLC flash makes it feasible to create more cost efficient mobile devices with large amount of data storage.

SanDisk

In August 2014, SanDisk announced the launch of new SanDisk Ultra II SSD with enhanced SSD Dashboard. The new drive is designed to deliver a cost-effective and easy upgrade solution for PC owners looking to improve performance, battery life, and power efficiency.

Oracle

Oracle provides the industry’s most complete and comprehensive portfolio of high performance, high reliability Flash cache and Flash storage solutions, from SSDs and PCle Flash cards to Hybrid / Flash Storage Arrays and Application Engineered Solutions,

Amit Malhotra of Oracle India, said: “These products are optimized for best performance on Oracle’s systems and Oracle’s Flash enables software such as Oracle’s Database Smart Flash Cache.”

Oracle’s Sun Flash storage powers businesses to accelerate their applications, improve business response times and increase productivity while reducing power and space. Together with Oracle’s broad range of servers, software, storage, and end-to-end system integration expertise, Oracle Flash solutions gives the highest level of performance, reliability, ease-of-use and efficiency.

Toshiba in SSD market

Last month, Toshiba said it aims to expand HDD market share to more than 20 percent in 2016. It aims to gain more than a 30 percent share of market of SSD (SAS interface) for data centers in the same year.

Toshiba will expand into high value-added business area such as software for storage systems and solution (appliances), etc. as a way to further expand and improve the profitability of the storage products business.

Rajani Baburajan
[email protected]

Related News

Latest News

Latest News