| storage
market research news & reports |
STORAGEsearch.com Pageviews
Grew 20%
Editor:-
May 6, 2008 -
STORAGEsearch.com today updated its monthly list of the top subjects
viewed by storage searchers in April.
The top 5 subjects were:-
(1)
-
Disk to disk backup - no
change
(2) -
Solid state disks - no
change
(3) -
2.5 inch SSDs - up 2
places
(4) - Hard
drives - no change
(5) -
NAS - down 2 places
Overall
pageviews grew 20% compared to the year ago period.
New 1.0" SSD HDD Directory
Editor:- April 28, 2008 -
STORAGEsearch.com published a new article and directory related to 1.0"
(and smaller) SSDs and HDDs.
Once the exclusive preserve of the
military, spooks and space scientists this market is now dominated by the needs
of shoppers for consumer lifestyle and entertainment gadgets - with market
volume projections resembling international phone numbers. ...read the article
Unveiling the Flash SSD Performance Roadmap
Editor:- April 17, 2008 -
STORAGEsearch.com published a new article today called - the Flash SSD
Performance Roadmap.
A few weeks ago a reader asked a very good
question. "Is there an industry roadmap for future flash SSD performance?"
That prompted other questions like... How fast are flash SSDs going to
be in 2009? or 2012? What are the technology factors which relate to
throughput and IOPS? And how much faster will they be than today.
There
wasn't a simple answer I could give at the time. Clues lay scattered all
across this web site and in my many
discussions about the market... But I agreed there should be a single place on
the web where these answers could be found. Forget Moore's Law. That gives you
the wrong answer, and this article explains why. ...read the article
1.8" Storage Drives - new directory
Editor:- March 10, 2008 - STORAGEsearch.com
published a new directory of 1.8" Storage Drives.
The
battle for supremacy in the 1.8" storage drive form factor, between
hard disks and
flash SSDs is
reminiscent of the 30 year war between Intel
and AMD over which processor would be
designed into PCs, notebooks and servers. Currently 21 oems actively market 1.8"
drives. ...read the
article
iSCSI Grew 4x Faster than NAS Market
FRAMINGHAM,
Mass - March 6, 2008 - Worldwide external disk storage systems factory revenues
grew 9.8% year-over-year in Q407 totaling $5.3 billion, according to
IDC.
Capacity shipped grew 56.3%.
Network disk storage grew
16% but the hot spot was
iSCSI with 70% revenue
growth.
For the full year,
EMC maintained its lead in
the external disk storage systems market with 22% revenue share, followed by
IBM and
HP.
Dell,
Hitachi, and
Network Appliance
ended the year in a statistical tie to round out the top 5. In this group
Network Appliance and Dell posted the strongest year-over-year revenue growth
during 2007, with 19% and 17% growth, respectively.
...IDC profile,
Market research
Editor's
comments:- for most of us (whose bonuses aren't linked to these numbers)
there's been no significant change in overall revenue growth in this part of the
storage market for many quarters. So you might say - what's new?
One
thing I'd say - is note the growing gap between the
hard disk market
which is growing nearly twice as fast as the "external disk systems
market". That's due to a black hole in consumer products which is sucking
in disks as fast as anyone can make them. And maybe due to lower margins in the
enterprise storage market due to competition from what IDC lumps together as "others"
- who have been trimming some of the fat off the top 5's oligopoly.
Another
thing, which IDC comments on is that the doom and gloom from the worldwide
financial markets doesn't seem to have slowed down this market.
iSuppli Says Flash Prices Dropping
Below Costs
Editor:-
February 20, 2008 - iSuppli Corp. is cutting its outlook for global
NAND flash revenue growth in 2008 to the single digit percentage range, down
from their previous outlook of a 27% rise.
In an early warning
sign of consumer weakness, Apple
has slashed its 2008 NAND order forecast significantly and has informed
suppliers that its demand growth will slow in 2008 compared to 2007, according
to iSuppli sources. This is expected to have a huge impact on the NAND market.
With its extremely popular flash-memory based
iPods, Apple was the world's
3rd largest OEM buyer of NAND flash
memory in 2007.
On the supply side, slower NAND demand will have a
major impact on suppliers' financial results. Capital spending on NAND
production will rise by more than 20% this year, ensuring easy availability of
parts. This will cause prices to decrease. iSuppli believes that NAND prices
already are below suppliers' fully loaded costs.
...iSuppli profile
Editor's comments:- buyers in the fast growing
flash SSD market
will be the beneficiaries of this downturn. As I predicted last year
overcrowding in the notebook SSD market means that prices are already well below
previously forecast levels.
Traditionally the big memory chip makers
switch fab production between RAM
and flash to whichever
reaps the highest price. But many
analysts already
predicted this would not be a good year for RAM oems either.
MCP Flash Report - to be or NOR to be?
Los Gatos, CA - February
8, 2008 - Objective Analysis has completed a new study entitled -
Flash Packaging: What Phone Makers Want & Why.
This 32-page report is an in-depth review of the flash MCP market for
cell phone handsets and looks into the reasons that OEMs choose the chip
configurations they do. One finding - flash multichip packages are
predominantly NOR/RAM configurations today and are likely to remain that way for
the next few years.
"NAND is making great headway in cell phone
handsets through both cards and embedded NAND stacks, but the multichip package
is still largely a NOR/RAM product," said Jim Handy, the report's author. "Although
NAND flash is finding some acceptance in handset MCPs, cell phone manufacturers
find that they have more flexibility by leaving the NAND out of this type of
package." ...Objective
Analysis profile
the Top 10 SSD OEMs in Q4 2007
Editor:- January 18, 2008
-
STORAGEsearch.com today published a new edition of - "the Top 10
Solid State Disk OEMs."
Covering the quarter ending
December 31, 2007 - there's a new #1, and a newcomer to the list. The article
also looks at market milestones and changes since the previous quarters.
If you're choosing
SSD suppliers or strategic
partners - this is the must-see predictive list of the top companies that
matter - based on hundreds of thousands of readers searching for SSD content
on the site rated most highly by SSD companies themselves. ...read the article
New Reports Predict Trends in Consumer
Storage
San
Jose, CA - January 2, 2008 - Coughlin Associates will release 2 new
reports at the 2008 Storage Visions conference later this week.
These are reports that no flash
memory,
optical storage or
hard disk drive company
should be without. They focus on the needs of consumer electronics - the
largest potential market for hard disk drives and the largest current market for
optical storage and flash memory.
The Consumer Survey on Digital
Storage in Consumer Electronics 2008 is a 93 page, 120 figure document
summarizing and analyzes the results from a comprehensive survey of 376 US
residents.
The Digital Storage in Consumer Electronics 2008 report is a detailed
look at major consumer electronics applications for mass storage. This
comprehensive 153-page document, authored by Tom Coughlin of Coughlin Associates
and Jim Handy of Objective
Analysis, has 76 figures and 15 tables.
"By 2013 total
content in an average US household could total almost 9TB" said Tom
Coughlin. ...Coughlin
Associates profile
Hybrid Hard Drives Market Report
Los
Gatos, CA - December 19, 2007 - The Hybrid Hard Drive will not make a big
splash in 2008, according to a new 36-page report by Objective Analysis.
PC users who are waiting for this technology to speed their boot
times are going to have to wait a little longer.
"Once all the kinks are ironed out, hybrid drives and their
counterparts should sweep the market," said Jim Handy, the report's author.
"Unfortunately, the hardware is ready but the software support is weak.
Hybrid drives will have to wait for better support to justify their small
additional cost."
Hybrid Hard Drives: How, Why, And When? - is an in-depth review of
the hybrid hard drive market, exploring the technology, implementation costs,
and expected benefits, as it explains why those benefits are not within reach
today. The report takes a special look at alternative technologies like SSDs,
Intel's Turbo Memory, the
SanDisk Vaulter Disk,
larger DRAM main memories
and DRAM HDD caches, and even small SSDs from
Samsung. The report
reviews members of the Hybrid Storage
Alliance members and details their product offerings.
Readers will learn how hybrid drives work and why they are receiving
so much attention today. They will also understand why hybrid drives will
threaten the SSD market, and why neither technology is likely to see much
acceptance until the second half of 2008 or later.
...Objective
Analysis profile
Storage Markets Says Goodbye
Editor:- November 12, 2007 - Storage
Markets today concluded its experiment of predicting trends and
transitions in the storage industry.
First launched in October
2006, the
publication /
market research site
says that over 560 storage industry professionals and end users participated
with insights and opinions.
Here at the mouse site - we have our own
way of predicting things - based on analyzing the storage search behaviour of
over 1 million readers and feeding that into
ScryWare. ...gone away storage
companies
Storage PR Agency of the Year 2007
Editor:- October 29,
2007 - STORAGEsearch.com today named A3 Communications -
Storage PR Agency of the Year 2007.
The award recognizes the
outstanding quality of client-editor interface by A3 Communications in the
past year.
"I work with thousands of content contributors"
said STORAGEsearch.com's Editor Zsolt Kerekes. "Effective PR Agencies
are a helpful tool in getting the right content to my readers. Sometimes I'll
miss the significance of a news
story when I see it first time round on my screen. Follow up from
intelligent agencies which understand the market can sometimes make me
reevaluate my snap decisions. PRs who respond quickly to requests for follow
up info - help me, their clients and readers. Many other agencies do all those
things too - but this year the work of Federica Monsone
founder of A3 Communications
was outstanding."
In 2005 the award was given to
JPR Communications. In 2006 no award was
made, because although the overall quality of PRs in the industry had risen, the
"best" was too close to call between several agencies.
US & Brits are Worst Backupers - says
Survey
SCOTTS
VALLEY, Calif - October 22, 2007 - A worldwide survey of over 10,000 adult
computer users sponsored by Seagate Technology finds that the US
population is well behind the rest of the world when it comes to taking the
proper steps to back up their digital files.
According to the
results of the poll conducted this summer by
Harris Interactive, a
little over a third of the adults in the US do not take the risk of losing their
digital content seriously.
This global poll of consumers also shows
that other English-speaking markets are just as far behind the curve as the US
when it comes to protecting their digital assets. While US and Great Britain
consumers are the most negligent at 35% neglecting to make backup copies of
digital content stored on their computer to external devices or media, Australia
trails close behind with 30% of the population not backing up.
Of the
6 international markets surveyed, China leads the world in
data backup with 83%
doing so, followed by France at 81% and Germany rounding out the top 3 with 73%
taking the proper steps to ensure they'll have access to their data even in the
event of a disc failure or system interruption.
The astonishing
discovery is that 31% of those surveyed are still not backing up even though
half of them (50%) have experienced the loss of important data in the past.
...Seagate profile
RAM versus Flash SSDs - War for the
Datacenter Core
Editor:- August 20,
2007 - STORAGEsearch.com today published a major new article
on the SSD market called - "RAM versus Flash SSDs - which is Best?"
We've been writing for years about the subject of
hard disks vs
flash SSDs.
There's a lot of consensus now about which technology will prevail in the
disputed application slots for a single drive.
The next multibillion
dollar war in the SSD market will be for domination in the high performance
rackmount server acceleration space.
Hard disks will retain no
finger holds in this war -
even if the
price of a hard disk drops to zero. Sorry guys. Hanging onto the hard disks
in your hot server core will kill your company - because they will make your
business applications too slow, too expensive and too unreliable. Outside the
core... as bulk content storage or
disk to disk backup is
another matter, for another article.
The SSD server core war will be
internecine - one type of solid state storage versus another. The title of this
article " "RAM versus Flash SSDs" is misleading because there
are many distinctly different products fighting under each similar looking
flag. With specially written features from the world's leading SSD companies
- this article will change the way that you think about SSDs in enterprise
server applications. 2007 will be seen as the Year of SSD Revolution. ...read the article,
...75 more articles
about Solid State Disksm
In-Stat Predicts Low SSD Takeup in PC
Market
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz
- July 16, 2007 - Although solid state drives will penetrate no more than 6%
of the PC market by 2011, they are poised for extraordinary growth in this
market from nearly nothing in 2006 to 24 million units in 2011, reports
In-Stat.
"There are few compelling reasons for
most PC purchasers to pay more money for less storage than they can get using an
HDD, so In-Stat expects HDDs
and Hybrid Drives to continue to outweigh SSDs in these applications for at
least the next several years," says Jim McGregor, In-Stat analyst. "Nevertheless,
SSDs' advantages in lower power, higher
reliability, lower
noise, and faster access than HDDs, in an extremely durable unit, make for rapid
growth in some markets, especially in
military and
industrial Ultra-Mobile Device."
Recent research by In-Stat indicated the higher price of an SSD will
limit its acceptance until it approaches parity with HDDs. In-Stat's report "Will
Solid-State Drives Revolutionize PCs?" costs $3,495.
...In-Stat profile,
Market research,
Solid State Disks
Editor's
comments:- In one respect this is compatible with STORAGEsearch's own
SSD Market
Penetration Model published a few years ago - because we saw no good
reasons for the desktop PC market to switch to SSDs. But I disagree with "price
parity" with hard disks being necessary before users make the switch to
SSDs. That's a narrow simplistic view which has already been invalidated by what
users have been doing in many key SSD market segments. | |
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storage history:-
see this market research page back in:-
2000,
2001,
2002,
2003,
2004,
2005,
2006,
2007 |
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Market
research can help you avoid going
down a dead end track and being
gobbled
up by the failed
storage company eating
monster. | |
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| The most popular
product ad page viewed on STORAGEsearch.com in April 2008 was this
below from Memoright | |
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| Are MLC SSDs Ever
Safe in Enterprise Apps? |
This is a follow up
article (published in March 2008) to the popular
SSD Myths and
Legends which, a year earlier demolished the myth that flash memory
wear-out (a comfort blanket beloved by many
RAM SSD makers)
precluded the use of flash in heavy duty datacenters.
This new
article looks at the risks posed by MLC Nand Flash SSDs which have recently
hatched from their breeeding ground as chip modules in cellphones and morphed
into
hard disk form
factors. |
 |
It starts down a familiar
lane but an unexpected technology twist (which arrived in my email while
writing this article) takes you to a startling new world of possibilities.
...read the
article | | |
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| Squeak!
- SSD Myths and Legends - "write endurance" |
| Does the
fatal gene of "write endurance" built into
flash
solid state
disks prevent their deployment in intensive server acceleration
applications - such as RAID
systems? |
It was
certainly true as little as a few years ago.
What's the risk with
today's devices?
This article looks at the current generation of
products and calculates how much (or how little) you should be worried. |
 | |
| RAM based SSDs have been
used alongside RAID for years - but
flash SSDs are
physically smaller and have bigger capacity (upto 160G in 2.5", 512G in
3.5") and are lower cost than RAM-SSDs and could actually be configured
in standard RAID boxes. F-SSDs aren't as fast as RAM based products but a single
flash SSD can deliver 20,000 IOPs - which when scaled up in an array - starts to
look interesting.
...read the
article,
storage reliability
solid state disks | |
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Squeak!
- the Fastest Solid State Disks
Speed isn't everything, and
it comes at a price. |
But if you do
need the speediest SSD
then wading through the web sites of over 55 current
SSD oems to find a suitable
candidate slows you down.
And the SSD search problem will get even
worse. |
| |
I predict
there will be over 100 SSD oems in 2008.
I've done the research for
you to save you time. And this page is updated daily from
storage news and direct
inputs from oems. ...read
the article, | |
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Squeak! -
Why are Most Analysts Wrong About Solid State Disks?
Most
analysts and editors of other computer publications don't really understand the
solid state disk market. They show their ignorance and naivete by prefacing
every discussion of SSDs with a superficial analysis which compares the cost per
byte of storage between flash and hard disk drives. That's the wrong answer to
the wrong question. And it's far removed from why the SSD market is racing to
become a multi billion dollar market seemingly in blithe ignorance of the cost
per byte proposition.
This article tells you what's important to users
and the main applications in which SSDs are already being used and new
applications where they will be used in the next 3 years. ...read the
article, Solid State Disks | |
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Flash
Memory vs. Hard Disk Drives - Which Will Win? - article by Semico Research
There's
a confusing picture in many consumer products like phones, cameras and music
players in which one day it seems that the storage function is done by flash
and next day another company announces they're doing the same thing with
miniature hard disks.
Is there any sense to this seemingly random
choice?
This article uses pricing trends, technology trends and
unique market analysis insights to show that users and oems may be able to
reliably predict which storage devices will be most cost effective depending
where you are on the future history curve. ...read the article,
Hard disk drives,
Flash Memory,
Market research,
Solid state disks | |
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