NAVIGATION
CORPORATE OFFICE
Zunesis, Inc.
4B Inverness Ct E Suite 100,
Englewood, CO 80112
(720) 221-5200
Las Vegas
6671 Las Vegas Blvd S
Building D Suite 210, Office 260
Las Vegas, NV 89119
(702) 837-5300
2017 was the year of worldwide memory shortages and price spikes. Here’s what the industry predicts for 2018.
Demand for flash memory is estimated to be growing over 45% year over year.
By the end of 2018, 3D NAND will achieve the majority of the market, with full capacity expected from the new 3D NAND fabrication facilities, relieving the shortage of NAND flash that hit the market late 2016 through 2017. This should offer some relief in NAND flash prices, which doubled between 2016 and the peak in 2017. However, prices lower than those in early 2016 may not occur again until 2019, or possibly later.
Several analysts expect that as a result NAND flash prices per TB of storage will decline between 20-30% from 2017 to 2018. SSDs became the largest consumer of NAND flash, starting in Q1 2017, surpassing smart phones. The movement from consumer products to client and enterprise products should help moderate the traditional NAND flash price cyclicality. Enterprise SSDs showed particular growth in 2017, with 150% y/y growth in shipped capacity. With declining NAND flash prices, 2018 should see increasing demand for NAND flash, particularly in the Enterprise market, where NAND flash is rapidly becoming primary storage in large storage arrays.
This is important, because 2018 is poised to be a year if unprecedented growth in the storage market.
Higher resolution video with higher dynamic range and more cameras are driving storage demand as is the growth of IoT devices and applications. While IoT data itself is short-term, the analytics that run on IoT edge devices, such as HPE Edgeline 4000, will create analytics data that will need to be protected long-term with low-cost storage solutions. It is also widely anticipated that 2018 will see a spike in the rise of metadata where storage arrays store both the data itself and interesting metadata about that data with a need for the metadata to be indexed and searchable.
The increase in the number of sensors, including cameras and the need for rapid processing of this data is creating a greater need for local and network edge storage as well as storage in big data centers (the cloud). Artificial intelligence and lowering costs for high-performance storage are driving new storage hierarchies. Flash will become primary storage for many applications in 2018 with object-based secondary storage and archiving roles in many data centers. At HPE, this challenge is being met by joining the Apollo storage platform with Qumulo file system software. Qumulo creates computing nodes on the Apollo platform, forming a cluster that has scalable performance and a single, unified file system. An Apollo/Qumulo solution can scale to billions of files and costs less than legacy storage appliances.
Even with the development of memory-centric computing technology, the need to move large amounts of data around data centers will increase. This will also drive the use of flash memory primary storage, driving hard disk drive storage into secondary storage applications that focus on the costs of storage and don’t require fast data rates.
Data security and privacy will be major drivers of storage investment in 2018. The rash of ransomware episodes as well as hacking data theft incidents in 2017 showed the general vulnerability of many enterprise environments. Many companies are touting various backup storage solutions as providing protection from ransomware. We see tape gaining respect as a valued element of many data protection solutions because it offers an offline “air-gapped” backup copy as well as Appliance solutions, like the HPE StoreOnce, that can be secured from encryption.
2017 saw NVMe firmly established as the technology that will transform solid-state storage systems and leading to flash memory as primary storage for many applications in 2018. Overall storage demand will continue to drive growth in stored capacity in all the major storage products: flash memory, HDDs and magnetic tape, with most of this growth in public and private cloud infrastructures. Data security and privacy will be major drivers for enterprise storage investment in 2018.
Wrapping up, all signs point to exciting new applications hitting the market in 2018 that will require a storage-demand surge. Good news is that supply should be protected by the rapid advances in 3D NAND flash.
NAVIGATION
CORPORATE OFFICE
Zunesis, Inc.
4B Inverness Ct E Suite 100,
Englewood, CO 80112
(720) 221-5200
Las Vegas
6671 Las Vegas Blvd S
Building D Suite 210, Office 260
Las Vegas, NV 89119
(702) 837-5300