May 20, 2019 at 21:01Forecast and discussion: hybrid storage systems will give way to all-flash
According to analysts at IHS Markit, hybrid storage systems (HDD) based on HDD and SSD this year will begin to be in less demand. We discuss the current situation. Photo - Jyrki Huusko - CC BY
In 2018, flash arrays accounted for 29% of the storage market. For hybrid solutions - 38%. IHS Markit is convinced that this year SSD-drives will be in the lead. According to their estimates, revenue from sales of flash arrays will increase to 33%, and from hybrid ones it will decrease to 30%.
Experts attribute the low demand for hybrid systems to the reduction in the HDD market. The IDC expects that by 2021 the number of manufactured HDDs will drop to 284 million devices — 140 million less than three years ago. The market volume for the same period will decrease by $ 750 million. Statista
confirms this trend, according to an analytical resource, since 2014 the volume of HDDs produced has decreased by 40 million devices.
HDD sales are falling in the data center segment. According to the Western Digital (WD) financial report, over the past year the number of HDDs sold for data centers has dropped from 7.6 million devices to 5.6 million ( p . 8 ). Last year, WD even announced that it was forced to close its factory in Malaysia. Also last summer, Seagate shares fell - by 7%.
The volumes of processed data are increasing. IDC says that the amount of data generated in the world will grow by 61% annually - by 2025 it will reach 175 zettabytes. It is expected that half of this data will be processed by data centers. To cope with the load, they will need productive storage systems based on SSD. There are cases when the transition to "solid-state" reduced the time to upload information from the database by six times.
IT companies are also developing new technologies designed to further increase the performance of all-flash storage. For example, the NVMe-oF protocol (NVM Express over Fabrics). It allows you to connect drives to the server via PCI Express (instead of the less efficient SAS and SATA interfaces) The protocol also contains a set of commands that reduce the delay in transferring information between SSDs. Similar solutions are already appearing on the market.
The cost of SSD is reduced. At the start of 2018, the price of a gigabyte of SSD memory was ten times higher than that of the HDD. However, by the end of 2018, it fell two to three times (from 20-30 to 10 cents per gigabyte). According to experts, by the end of 2019, it will be eight cents per gigabyte. In the near future, prices for SSDs and HDDs will equal - this can happen already in 2021.
One of the reasons for the cheapening of SSDs is the competition between manufacturers who seek to attract customers with low prices. Some companies, such as Huawei, are already sellingsolid state drives at the price of hard drives with a similar capacity.
Energy consumption is growing. Each year, data centers consume 200 terawatt hours of electricity. According to some reports , by 2030 this figure will grow by fifteen times. Data center operators are trying to increase the efficiency of the computing infrastructure and reduce energy consumption.
One way to reduce the cost of electricity in the data center are solid state drives. For example, KIO Networks, a cloud-based company, enabled SSDs to reduce the amount of electricity consumed by the data center by 60%. At the same time, solid state drives have higher energy efficiency than hard drives. In study2018 Brazilian and French scientists SSD overtook the HDD in terms of the amount of data transferred to the joule of energy.
Photo - Peter Burka - CC BY-SA
Hard drives are too early to write off. Data center operators will use them for cold archives and backups for a long time to come. From 2016 to 2021, the volume of sales of HDDs for storing rarely used data will double. The trend is also observed in the financial reports of the Seagate hard drive manufacturer: from 2013 to 2018, the demand for the company's products for “cold” tasks increased by 39% (8 slide presentation ).
Cold storage does not require high performance, so there is no point in introducing SSD arrays into them - especially while the price of solid-state drives (although it is decreasing) remains high. While HDD remain in business and will be further used in the data center.
In the corporate blog ITGLOBAL.COM:
confirms this trend, according to an analytical resource, since 2014 the volume of HDDs produced has decreased by 40 million devices.
HDD sales are falling in the data center segment. According to the Western Digital (WD) financial report, over the past year the number of HDDs sold for data centers has dropped from 7.6 million devices to 5.6 million ( p . 8 ). Last year, WD even announced that it was forced to close its factory in Malaysia. Also last summer, Seagate shares fell - by 7%.
Why is the growing demand for SSD
The volumes of processed data are increasing. IDC says that the amount of data generated in the world will grow by 61% annually - by 2025 it will reach 175 zettabytes. It is expected that half of this data will be processed by data centers. To cope with the load, they will need productive storage systems based on SSD. There are cases when the transition to "solid-state" reduced the time to upload information from the database by six times.
IT companies are also developing new technologies designed to further increase the performance of all-flash storage. For example, the NVMe-oF protocol (NVM Express over Fabrics). It allows you to connect drives to the server via PCI Express (instead of the less efficient SAS and SATA interfaces) The protocol also contains a set of commands that reduce the delay in transferring information between SSDs. Similar solutions are already appearing on the market.
The cost of SSD is reduced. At the start of 2018, the price of a gigabyte of SSD memory was ten times higher than that of the HDD. However, by the end of 2018, it fell two to three times (from 20-30 to 10 cents per gigabyte). According to experts, by the end of 2019, it will be eight cents per gigabyte. In the near future, prices for SSDs and HDDs will equal - this can happen already in 2021.
One of the reasons for the cheapening of SSDs is the competition between manufacturers who seek to attract customers with low prices. Some companies, such as Huawei, are already sellingsolid state drives at the price of hard drives with a similar capacity.
Energy consumption is growing. Each year, data centers consume 200 terawatt hours of electricity. According to some reports , by 2030 this figure will grow by fifteen times. Data center operators are trying to increase the efficiency of the computing infrastructure and reduce energy consumption.
One way to reduce the cost of electricity in the data center are solid state drives. For example, KIO Networks, a cloud-based company, enabled SSDs to reduce the amount of electricity consumed by the data center by 60%. At the same time, solid state drives have higher energy efficiency than hard drives. In study2018 Brazilian and French scientists SSD overtook the HDD in terms of the amount of data transferred to the joule of energy.
Photo - Peter Burka - CC BY-SA
What's with the HDD
Hard drives are too early to write off. Data center operators will use them for cold archives and backups for a long time to come. From 2016 to 2021, the volume of sales of HDDs for storing rarely used data will double. The trend is also observed in the financial reports of the Seagate hard drive manufacturer: from 2013 to 2018, the demand for the company's products for “cold” tasks increased by 39% (8 slide presentation ).
Cold storage does not require high performance, so there is no point in introducing SSD arrays into them - especially while the price of solid-state drives (although it is decreasing) remains high. While HDD remain in business and will be further used in the data center.
In the corporate blog ITGLOBAL.COM:
- Why should a cloud provider client know the level of data center reliability
- GDPR effect: how the new regulation has affected the IT ecosystem
- NetApp Storage in Different Business Areas: Case Studies
- Servers for SAP: Major Platforms
- NetApp A to Z: Overview of Vendor Technologies Used in Modern Storage Systems