Enterprise IT Drives Solid State Adoption

An expanded update to the report on the market for flash-based solid-state drives (SSDs) in enterprise servers and SANs (storage area networks) has found this area of the storage market will grow from 150,000 units in 2010 to over 4.1 million units in 2015, representing an average annual growth of nearly 90 percent.

The report from Objective Analysis has found that SSDs are gaining traction in the enterprise server market. It predicts that enterprise SSD revenues should reach $510 million (£354m) in 2010 and will grow at a 55 percent average annual rate to total $3.8 billion (£2.6bn) by 2015.

SSD price decline driving growth

The report claims that a significant portion of this growth will be driven by a steep price decline in the SSD market, sparked by a downturn in NAND flash market prices and a move from single layer cell (SLC) to multi-level cell (MLC) flash. While other important price declines driven by a maturing of SSD Controller technology and strong enterprise growth in large Internet, as well as transaction processing, systems would support faster adoption.

As a result, that enterprise hard-disk drives (HDDs) are threatened by this new technology, which initially replaced enterprise HDDs at a 10:1 ratio. But this, the report warned, will drop to 2.5:1 by the end of the forecast period. This means that the enterprise HDD market will shrink faster than the enterprise SSD market can grow, it concluded.

“That’s a growth rate of 90 percent per annum, which reflects the rapid take-up and the falling prices that we are continuing to see in the SSD marketplace,” said Andy Cordial, managing director of Origin Storage.

“If you delve into the report, you find that the magnetic hard drive market is predicted to shrink considerably over the next five years, with the slack being more than taken up by SSD technology,” he added.

Lower latency

SSDs, Cordial said, have many benefits in the enterprise and SAN marketplace, not the least of which is their ability to handle more data at much lower latencies than their magnetic counterparts.

He also pointed to the release of SSDs in lower capacities, of around the 30-gigabyte mark, by the likes Intel and Kingston and other manufacturers, allowing them to be used as boot drives. “This significantly speeds the boot-up cycle for those applications where speed of recovery from a power-down is of importance. Add in the speed advantages that SSDs offer in the transaction processing environment and it’s no small wonder that the market for the technology is taking off.”