Digital Media Storage to Record 11.4 Billion Units in Annual Sales by 2018

Global Industry Analysts, Inc. announces a report on Digital Media Storage ($4,950, 1,059 pages).

The global market for Digital Media Storage is projected to record 11.4 billion units in annual sales by the year 2018, primarily driven by increase in the number of home and small business networks, continued data explosion, and the growing need for data backup and archiving. Robust demand from developing markets, AsiaPac in particular, also augurs well for the market.

In a knowledge-driven era where information is the engine that drives enterprises worldwide, management of information is gaining utmost importance. Widespread implementation of CRM and ERP solutions have contributed towards enterprise data explosion by triggering exponential growth in the volume of information generated about partners, suppliers, and customers.

Other factors driving data growth and the ensuing storage needs include generation of rich media, regulatory compliance that mandates maintenance of audit trails, and financial data, and gargantuan email archives, given that email is a primary vehicle of business communication.

Networked machines, sensors and processes additionally generate a steady stream of real time data, which adds to the information overload being confronted by modern companies. Against the backdrop, where data literally determines the way of life for companies, it is of little surprise that storage is now the top investment priority of companies worldwide. As the most important asset for any company is information and data, businesses are now earmarking lucrative budgets for digital information management tools including storage solutions. Bigger companies with bulk storage needs represent an attractive customer cluster.

The Internet’s impact on data centers has been huge, triggering data explosion as a result of faster, quicker, denser, and increased number of transactions. As a result, data centers have become bigger and larger making them the hummers of the information age. The surge in data in the modern world as reflected by the staggering increase in data volumes over the last few years has resulted in a massive data center crunch with companies scampering to address the issues with strategies, such as, buying of additional data centre capacity. Increased number of data center constructions translates into increased need for digital media storage products and solutions. As data centers come under increasing pressures to keep up with increasing storage needs, the ensuing initiatives directed at enhancing storage capacities will bring out digital media storage technologies such as storage servers, network hard drives, and external hard drives, among others, as prime beneficiaries.

HDDs for enterprise applications such as in servers and storage systems are therefore poised to grow in the upcoming years, driven by mind bending increases in data being generated and the ensuing need to store the same. Maximum areal densities in HDD for use in the enterprise environment is witnessing increase and is forecast to double over the next couple of years, which is not surprising given the rise in storage-intensive applications across the enterprise platform. Continued incremental improvements in perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology and the ensuing easing of technical bottleneck will additionally aid in density increases of HDDs. In this regard, heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology is gaining in importance given its ability to achieve higher densities in comparison with the more conventional PMR technology. With densities increasing from 550Gb/inch², 625Gb/inch² to 1TB, the future now stands ready for the evolution and launch of 5TB hard disk drives.

Given the disadvantages associated with HDDs and optical storage devices containing moving parts, such as, spinning disks and movable read/write heads, SSD are rising in popularity and are being touted as the future of digital storage. The scale-out architecture of these systems and plug-and-play storage features remain important competitive advantages stacked in its favor. Armed with solid state semiconductor battery backed RAM, EPROM, DRAM or flash memory boards and with an integrated memory bus board, a CPU, and a battery card, SSD devices will in the long term replace hard disk storage given the envisaged inability of hard drives to continue to deliver application performance needed in future systems.

The replacement is expected to take place even in the event of solid state storage technology failing to achieve cost parity with existing technologies. This is primarily because computing power of each new generation of processors has and will continue to double requiring storage technologies to be capable of closing the performance gap. This need to plug in the processor/disk performance gap will therefore drive up demand for  SSDs. SSD replacement of hard drives in the consumer PC market is forecast to be extremely slow and time consuming while the same in the enterprise online storage market is poised to be rapid. Over 90% of online storage drives in the enterprise market is projected to be based on solid state by the year 2022. The lethargic adoption in the consumer PC market is largely due to the fact that common PC functionalities do not require the high levels of performance provided by SSDs.

AsiaPac represents the most prominent regional market with annual sales in the region waxing at a CAGR of about 3.5% over the analysis period 2010-2018. Growth in this region has and will continue to be supported by the growing consumption of entertainment services. The growing clout of middle class households, increasing disposable incomes, urbanization and waxing popularity of mass entertainment, are poised to benefit sales of optical storage media, such as, HD DVDs, Blu-ray discs, and flash memory products like USB flash drives. By product, optical disc market continues to remain the largest segment accounting for a majority share of the total unit sales in the market. Growth in the optical disc market is currently being driven by fast growing sub-category Blu-Ray Discs.

HDD market, on the other hand, represents the fastest growing product market, with unit sales growing at a CAGR of about 22.2% over the analysis period 2010-2018.

Major players in the global marketplace include Imation Corp., Kingmax Technology, Inc., Kingston Technology Corporation, LaCie S.A.S, Lexar Media, Inc., PNY Technologies, Inc., Ritek Corporation, SanDisk Corp., Seagate Technology plc, Sony Corporation, Toshiba Corporation, Transcend Information, Inc., Verbatim Americas, LLC, and Western Digital Corporation, among others.