On from IHS Markit, hybrid storage systems based on HDD and SSD will begin to be in less demand this year. We discuss the current situation.
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In 2018, flash arrays accounted for 29% of the storage market. For hybrid solutions - 38%. IHS Markit is convinced that SSD drives will take the lead this year. According to their estimates, revenue from sales of flash arrays will grow to 33%, and from hybrid ones will decrease to 30%.
Experts attribute the low demand for hybrid systems to the reduction of the HDD market. IDC expects HDD production to drop to 2021 million units by 284, down 140 million from three years ago. The volume of the market for the same period will be reduced by 750 million dollars. Statista This trend, according to the analytical resource, since 2014, the volume of HDDs produced has decreased by 40 million devices.
HDD sales are also falling in the data center segment. According to a Western Digital (WD) financial report, over the past year, the number of data center HDDs sold has fallen from 7,6 million devices to 5,6 million (). Last year WD even forced to close their factory in Malaysia. Also in the summer of last year, Seagate shares fell - by 7%.
Why is the demand for SSDs growing?
The volume of processed data is increasing. IDC says that the amount of data generated in the world grow by 61% annually - by 2025 it will reach a value of 175 zettabytes. It is expected that half of this data will be processed by data centers. To cope with the load, they will need high-performance SSD-based storage systems. There are cases when the transition to "solid state" unloading information from the database six times.
Also, IT companies are developing new technologies designed to further increase the performance of all-flash storage systems. For example, the NVMe-oF (NVM Express over Fabrics) protocol. It allows you to connect drives to the server via PCI Express (instead of less efficient interfaces ΠΈ ). The protocol also contains a set of commands that reduce the delay in the transfer of information between SSDs. Similar solutions are already On the market.
The cost of SSDs is coming down. At the start of 2018, the price of a gigabyte of SSD memory ten times higher than HDD. However, by the end of 2018, she two or 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 SSD and HDD will be equal - this is already in 2021 year.
One of the reasons for the rapid reduction in the cost of SSDs is competition between manufacturers who seek to attract customers with low prices. Some companies, such as Huawei, are already solid state drives for the price of hard drives with the same capacity.
Energy consumption is growing. Every year, data centers consume 200 terawatt-hours of electricity. By , by 2030 this figure will increase fifteenfold. Data center operators are trying to improve the efficiency of the computing infrastructure and reduce energy consumption.
One way to reduce the cost of electricity in the data center is solid state drives. For example, the company KIO Networks, operating in the cloud, SSD the volume of electricity consumed by the data center by 60%. However, SSDs are more energy efficient than HDDs. IN Brazilian and French scientists from 2018, SSD overtook HDD in terms of the amount of data transferred per joule of energy.
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What's up with the HDD
Hard drives are still too early to write off. Data center operators will continue to use them for cold storage of archives and backups for a long time to come. From 2016 to 2021, HDD sales volume for storage of rarely used data twice. The trend can also be seen in the financial reports of the hard drive manufacturer Seagate: from 2013 to 2018, the demand for the company's products for "cold" tasks increased by 39% (8 slide ).
Cold storage does not require high performance, so it makes no sense to implement SSD arrays in them - especially as long as the price of SSDs (albeit declining) remains high. For now, HDDs remain in business and will continue to be used in the data center.
In the ITGLOBAL.COM corporate blog:
Source: habr.com