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what to tell your
VC, lawyer, and non
technical friends who don't work in the computer industry
by Zsolt Kerekes,
editor - published June 21, 2010 |
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You've all heard about
SSDs.
Zillions of
articles
talk about them. I've written
a few myself.
But what is all the fuss and excitement about?
This article gives
you a simple summary of what you need to know. I've tried to make it as non
technical as I can. (Really.)
SSDs are electronic modules which work
with computer systems. You don't need to know
how they work. You
just need to know what they can do.
- what can SSDs do for
servers?
SSDs can speed up nearly all server applications by 3x.
Sometimes
the speedup can be as much as 40x.
These speedups can be achieved at the same time as using less
servers, less space, less power and lower cost than using traditional (rotating
hard disk) technology.
If you consider that processor clock speeds only grew about 4x in the
past decade - and hard disk storage speeds didn't increase at all - then using
SSDs is like leaping your server performance 10 years forwards in time
in a single day!
- what can SSDs do for
notebooks?
SSDs can significantly speed up notebooks, make them lighter and
increase battery life.
This non trivial result requires a good
SSD-aware design. Unfortunately there are no true SSD notebook paragons yet.
Nearly all current notebooks were designed originally for hard drives and have
been adapted for SSDs. Imperfect SSD notebooks can deliver some improvements -
but not as many as native SSD designs. And I include the OS as part of the
design.
The OS plays a bigger factor in notebooks than in servers -
because server economics enable designers the luxury of packing more CPU power
in the SSD controller - and the best server SSD solutions tend to be
heterogeneous or OS-agnostic. Is there more?
For
brevity I've just mentioned 2 headline applications for SSDs which work now.
There are 5 categories described in StorageSearch.com's
SSD market
adoption model (published in 2005) - 4 of which already exist now and
another recent addition - which is an emerging new category. |
what about SSD's future?
I've
mentioned above what SSDs can do today in products which are familiar. And for
most of you - that's all you need to know.
But SSDs are a disruptive
technology which will change the landscape of the future computer market and
create a new technology bubble with new market leaders.
Examples of
past bubbles include the microprocessor
(mid 1970s) the
Wintel PC
(early 1980s) the
commoditization of
parallel servers which was an enabling technology for the affordability of
the commercial
internet (mid 1990s).
SSDs will change the way computer products
are designed - so that by 2015 nearly all products will be designed to be
SSD-centric - instead of HDD-centric as they have been for
over 50 years.
In
the future - SSDs will enable new markets and applications which do not yet
exist. SSDs will enable a new class of data leveraging applications which
create value from
datasets in ways which were impossible with the limitations of past servers
and storage systems. The impact of these new markets will be as significant as
the impact of search-engines has been to the utility of the web.
what's the business impact of SSDs?
When technology
markets have the potential to grow big fast - there's a
bubble effect which
is fueled by
- greed - the desire to make money and
- fear - the fear of becoming irrelevant by not participating in a
new market which may have an important impact on the business you're already in
Take
a look at these numbers - which show the number of SSD manufacturers
listed on StorageSearch.com
- 1998 - 10 companies
- 2005 - 30 companies
- 2007 - 63
companies
- 2008 - 92
companies
- 2010 - 200 plus companies - includes some not yet publicly listed
- 2013 - 1,000 plus companies - forecast extrapolated from internal market
models
SSD annual revenue - (StorageSearch.com estimates) - for more
revenue data see
SSD analysts
I
was the 1st storage market
analyst to raise my head above the parapet and say that SSDs had the
capability to grow to be a $10 billion / year market and I published a
catalytic report to that effect in 2003.
The initial reactions from
SSD company founders and marketing VPs were incredulity and surprise.
But after talking to most of the leading companies in the market at that time
(and some future SSD market leaders who were still in stealth mode) many SSD
oem thought leaders I spoke to - who previously had thought about the SSD
market only within the context of their own isolated market silos realized
that things could change dramatically to the upside and revised their own
plans accordingly and thereby lit the match to fire up the business and product
development engines that began to transform the SSD market from its previous
quiet obscurity to today's frenetic revolution.
I warned everyone
at the start - that the cozy old ways of SSD marketing would change too - and
that a bigger market would also mean a tougher more competitive market in which
marketing would become more important. Some understood that - adapted and
thrived - others did not and have dwindled into obscurity or disappeared.
- 2009 - $1
billion
- 2010 -
$2 billion
- 2011 -
$4 billion (predicted) - actual was $5 billion
- 2015 - $15
billion
- 2019 - $50 billion to ???
As we progress from where we are now to
where I think the market is heading there will be
- excitement - the thrill of being able to do things with
computers for the 1st time which were previously impossible, slow or out of
reach to most budgets. That ranges from faster computer games for kids, to the
making of new companies - like the next Intel, Microsoft, Sun and Google.
- vendor pain - hundreds of companies will crash and burn (VC funded
SSD companies which get it wrong) or fade quietly into a less frenetic
retirement (storage makers, chip makers, OS designers and others who were
leaders in HDD technology generations - but who fail to transition to the new
SSD data driven economy).
- user pain - those who bought an SSD which needed needed
upgrades to make it
work, those whose SSDs trashed
their data or failed before their alloted time, those who had a great
experience from their 1st generation SSD and then forgot to be careful and had
a terrible time when
they switched to a cheaper alternative supplier, those who thought they were
buying from a safe proven company - only to realize that they were an
unsuspecting beta site for a new technology disguised in an old brand.
At
this point I realize that yet another promise of a "short article" has
failed. But I hope you get the general idea. If you found parts of it useful -
tell your friends and colleagues to see it themselves.
There are
hundreds more articles about SSDs already on this site - ranging from
comments about individual companies - new product launches - technologies and
details of how to design new SSDs - and a lot more to come.
Thanks for
taking the time to read StorageSearch.com - "leading the way to the new
storage frontier."
...Looking ahead:-
My next SSD article will be
called - Branding
Strategies in the SSD Market.
As the marketing girl in
the Hitchhikers Guide to the
Galaxy said - re the development of the wheel - "Alright, Mr.
Wiseguy... "if you're so clever, you tell us what color it should be."
How will users navigate their way through thousands of SSD messages
which compete for their attention?
In the time honored way of learning
to recognize, filter out and disregard the 99% of SSD babel which is for
someone else.
What can marketers do to create better messages for the
SSD age?
How can users recognize a good SSD brand when they see it?
...Later:- in January 2011 - Broadcast Engineering magazine
published my article
the
future of data storage.
It's a completely new article which takes
as its starting point - storage market models and concepts from several
futuristic articles which have already appeared here on the mouse site -
advances them and integrates them into a single cohesive whole. |
|
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..... |
|
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| ... |
| "When you start seeing
a permament flash SSD link on EMC's home page - you'll know that the
company is taking SSD more seriously. ." |
| ...Who's who in SSD? - EMC -
January 2012 | | |
| ... |
|
|
| ... |
| SSD Pricing -
where does all the money go? |
SSDs are among the most
expensive computer hardware products you will ever buy.
Understanding
the factors which determine SSD costs is often a confusing and irritating
process... |
 |
...not made any easier when
market prices for identical capacity SSDs can vary more than 100x to 1!
Why is that? ...read
the article | | | |
| . |
| What's the
best / cheapest - PC SSD? |
Editor:- I often get emails
from readers which ask the above question.
An article on
StorageSearch.com - called
What's the best
/ cheapest PC SSD? - is my attempt to create a simple FAQs page - which
answers the question... |
 |
...of why I can't answer
your question - and follows on to pose some probing questions which you
can ask yourself. ...read the article | | | |
| . |
What's the
best way to design a flash SSD?
and other questions which split SSD
opinion |
| More than 10 key areas of
fundamental disagreement within the SSD industry are discussed in an article
here on StorageSearch.com called
the
the SSD Heresies. |
 |
... |
Why can't SSD's true believers agree upon
a single coherent vision for the future of solid state storage? ...read the article | | | |
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| Can you believe the
word "reliability" in a 2.5" SSD ad? |
Editor:-
Reliability is an
important factor in many applications which use
SSDs.... but can you trust
an SSD brand just because it claims to be reliable?
As we've seen in
recent years - in the rush for the
SSD market bubble -
many design teams which previously had little or no experience of SSDs were
tasked with designing such products - and the result has been successive waves
of flaky SSDs and
SSDs whose specifications
couldn't be relied on to remain stable and in many products quickly
degraded in customer sites. |
 |
As part of an education
series for SSD product marketers - this case study describes how one company -
which didn't have the conventional background to start off with - managed to
equate their brand of SSD with reliability in the minds of designers in the
embedded systems market. ...read the article | | | | |
