It Never Happens Before: Growth of WW Storage Capacity Drastically Slowing

Historically the storage capacity shipped in the world was growing at around 40% per year since decades. But the appetite of end users seems to change.

Look at these figures:

• Trendfocus: Total exabyte shipment on HDDs declined each quarter from 3Q14 to 2Q15, from 142EB to 122EB. For sure, SSD capacity shipped is increasing, for example by 13% from 1Q15 to 2Q15, reaching 6.4EB, but this later figure does not compensate the huge decrease for HDDs. And we just evoke two other storage media – tape and optical disc – out of shape since several years.
• IDC: Total storage capacity of disk storage systems in EMEA grew only 2% Y/Y to 2.8EB in 2Q15 from 2Q14. For 1Q15 the figures were a little better, 16% and 2.9EB respectively, but far from the much higher regular annual historical annual growth. Add that global revenue of storage systems shipped worldwide is now regularly decreasing even with the arrival with great success of hybrid and all-flash arrays.

What’s happening? We analyze here several reasons.

You can blame the current economic trend but in the past, there were worst periods without significant effects on the demand of storage capacity by enterprises and consumers.

The reduction trend is happening on the consumer market. A report from Trend Micro reveals that a little more than half of respondents on a survey claimed all the items on their computers were irreplaceable, and admitted to using or revisiting only about 20% of that data on a regular basis. Here also there is a lot to do to delete a lot of files. Good examples here are email boxes full of unused messages, songs never listened, video never watched, application software never used, etc.

With cloud storage booming, you can think that users do not need now to buy external disk systems to backup and archiving their data, preferring to store them for free or low prices offered by cloud storage providers. But this reason is not really decisive: the total storage capacity does not vary if data are stored in-house or in the cloud. Furthermore, for more security, hybrid solutions are preferred, meaning more spending capacity.

We suggest that users care more about capacity when they buy SSDs, because of their higher price per gigabyte compared to HDDs. Some of them will prefer a notebook with 256GB on flash rather 500GB on HDD or speed rather than capacity.

People sometimes replace PCs or notebooks with tablets containing much less internal storage capacity.

When enterprises buy an all-flash system, they clean the data of their primary disk unit before migration to silicon memories to diminish the price of the new storage system depending directly on the capacity of high priced SSDs.

Streaming is now working quite well on Internet. Users are not obliged anymore to load entire movies and have just to look at them by streaming them, not to store them before viewing, like with Netflix.

Compression and more than that, de-dupe, can reduce considerably the storage capacity, by 10x and more depending on the type of data. These two technologies are broadly used into all-flash systems but not for disk arrays for reasons we never understood.

Conclusion:
The worldwide storage capacity is not going to decline, pushed today by applications like big data, video surveillance, Internet of Things, media & entertainment with 4K resolution. But it’s slowing and there is currently a (momentary?) pause.