On Jul 30, 2009, at 12:07 PM, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
On Thu, 30 Jul 2009, Andrew Gabriel wrote:
Except for price/GB, it is game over for HDDs. Since price/GB is
based on
Moore's Law, it is just a matter of time.
SSD's are a sufficiently new technology that I suspect there's
significant probably of discovering new techniques which give
larger step improvements than Moore's Law for some years yet.
However, HDD's aren't standing still
FLASH technology is highly mature and has been around since the
'80s. Given this, it is perhaps the case that (through continual
refinement) FLASH has finally made it to the point of usability for
bulk mass storage. It is not clear if FLASH will obey Moore's Law
or if it has already started its trailing off stage (similar to what
happened with single-core CPU performance).
Only time will tell. Currently (after rounding) SSDs occupy 0% of
the enterprise storage market even though they dominate in some
other markets.
According to Gartner, enterprise SSDs accounted for $92.6M of a
$585.5M SSD market in June 2009, representing 15.8% of the SSD
market. STEC recently announced an order for $120M of ZeusIOPS
drives from "a single enterprise storage customer." From 2007 to
2008, SSD market grew by 100%. IDC reports Q1CY09 had
$4,203M for the external disk storage factory revenue, down 16%
from Q1CY08 while total disk storage systems were down 25.8%
YOY to $5,616M[*]. So while it looks like enterprise SSDs represented
less than 1% of total storage revenue in 2008, it is the part that is
growing rapidly. I would not be surprised to see enterprise SSDs at
5-10%
of the total disk storage systems market in 2010. I would also expect to
see total disk storage systems revenue continue to decline as fewer
customers buy expensive RAID controllers. IMHO, the total disk storage
systems market has already peaked, so the enterprise SSD gains at
the expense of overall market size. Needless to say, whether or not
Sun can capitalize on its OpenStorage strategy, the market is moving
in the same direction, perhaps at a more rapid pace due to current
economic conditions.
[*] IDC defines a Disk Storage System as a set of storage elements,
including controllers, cables, and (in some instances) host bus
adapters,
associated with three or more disks. A system may be located outside of
or within a server cabinet and the average cost of the disk storage
systems
does not include infrastructure storage hardware (i.e. switches) and
non-bundled storage software.
-- richard
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