Storage Predictions for 2019 by StorageNewsletter.com – Part One

There is not a big difference between our predictions for 2018 and here in 2019.

We didn’t find revolutionizing storage technologies even if there will be a lot of enhancements in the current $100 billion+ storage industry. A report by IDC, sponsored by Seagate, projected annual generation of 175ZB of data by 2023, a deluge.

SSDs
There is a strong demand. The price is finally going down drastically this year to get reasonable prices with several fabs competing, and consequently they will continue to faster replace HDDs from PCs and notebooks, and up to high-end storage systems. Over 50% of mobile computers are expected to use SSDs in 2019. The massive move from 2D to 3D NAND will allow bigger capacities and lower prices from all flash chip makers (including Intel/Micron, Powerchip, Samsung, SK Hynix, Toshiba, Western Digital/SanDisk). USB keys and portable phones will also benefit. As well the fast PCIe interface with NVMe, with higher bandwidth and lower latency, will flood the market to progressively taking the place of 6Gb SATA and 6Gb/12Gb SAS connections. High-priced but extremely fast3D XPoint/Optane based on phase-change from Intel/Micron is beginning to be adopted.

HDDs
Their areal density is extremely difficult to increase. Now the only way is to add more disks into drives filled with helium inside the units to reach now 15TB in 3.5-inch form factor from Western Digital using SMR. Seagate and Toshiba will probably follow. Seagate achieves 16TB on internal HAMR 3.5-Inches HDD test units supposed to be largely available in 2019. WD promised MAMR reaching 16TB this year and 40TB by 2025. But the complete specs based on those completely new two technologies have not been released and it’ not sure that they will be better than current HDDs but power consumption. Hybrid HDDs are disappearing. The future of notebook 2.5-inch HDDs is questionable as their capacity is stagnating and largely being attacked by SSDs. That’s the same for high-capacity enterprise 2.5-inch rotating devices at 10,000rpm and 15,000rpm, to be stopped by WD and maybe by the two other HDD makers. Here high-capacity 3.5-inch units at 5,400rpm and 7,200rpm will probably be the last successful devices for their much better prices per gigabyte vs. SSDs for secondary storage. But in the competition, prices of HDDs are stabilizing. Seagate is supposed to introduce products with MACH 2 dual actuator technology in 2019 to approximately double the data rate.

Tape
The market did not rebound with the arrival of LTO-8, at 12TB native, that became a proprietary technology with only one drive maker (IBM) and very few Japanese cartridge manufacturers (only two, FujiFilm and Sony). Spectra Logic foresees the availability of LTO-9 at 24TB per tape cartridge in two years, LTO-10 at 48TB in four years, LTO-11 at 96TB in six or seven years, and LTO-12 at 190+TB in eight to nine years. Record of native 20TB for a proprietary TS format tape cartridge has been reached by IBM on its TS1160 tape drive to increase capacity of its enterprise libraries up to 351PB, as well as automation products from Spectra Logic up to 2,000PB. Tape is now about exclusively for archiving but in competition with the cloud archiving approaches promoted by AWS, Google and Azure.

Optical
With limited capacity at a maximum of 500GB on one Blu-ray disc, it’s nothing compared to LTO-8, and vendors are in limited number, essentially Panasonic and Sony.

Storage-Class Memory
Wait for slow progress into servers.

Interfaces
The industry has jumped rapidly on the bandwagon of PCIe/NVMe/NVMe-oF and USB Type C, this later inaugurated by Apple becoming the main interface for all notebooks, PCs and even smartphones for its fast speed. But Thunderbolt hook on with 40Gb/s bandwidth. SAS and SATA will decline like FC even with 32Gb/s speed but with less and less offerings.

Promising markets and applications:
• The storage industry increased sales with the adoption of General Data Protection Regulation (GPDR), a compliance from EU with 28 countries now in effect and necessary also for companies doing business with European organizations.
• 25/50/100GbE will gain adoption over 10GbE and Mellanox IB and Intel OmniPath connection will be adopted for HPC only.
• Convergence and more than that hyper-convergence, even for secondary storage, continue to be two major trends. It’s obvious when you see the huge growth of public company like Nutanix.
• All-flash arrays is pushing the storage system market in competition with flash as a software-defined tier. Hybrid configurations in competition with a mix of SSDs and HDDs is suffering with decreasing prices of flash.
• That’s the end of monolithic storage subsystems replaced by lower-priced scale-out architecture comprising several nodes (servers with HDDs or SSDs that can be add on demand) on a fast GbE network with, on top of that, a software managing the entire system and excluding expansive disk array controllers as one or more copies of data are split on different nodes.
• Among the most promising market for storage continues to be the video industry including surveillance and post-production with the increase of image definitions needing huge storage capacities and archiving capabilities. We can also mention life sciences, oil and gas and gaming.
• Ransomware protection is more and more added to backup software.
• IoT, market evaluated at $745 billion in 2019 by IDC, is exploding and it needs storage.
• Continue to look at what happens in storage systems following the Dell EMC merger as, up to now, it was not a hit with big competitor NetApp in better shape thanks to AFAs but it’s changing for Dell EMC storage with third consecutive quarter of revenue growth for storage since 1FQ19. Here follow Lenovo (now in partnership with NetApp) and Inspur. On its side IBM is stagnant.

Read also:
Storage Predictions for 2018 by StorageNewsletter.com
No revolution, just enhancements, with software taking over hardware
By Jean Jacques Maleval and Philippe Nicolas | 2018.01.01 | News