Storage Visions 2009
By John Latta, WAVE
0903 2/6/09
Las Vegas , NV
January 6-7, 2009
Storage Visions is a niche conference addressing the role which storage technology is and will play in the consumer market and more. It attracts leading players across the range of storage technologies such as: HDD and Flash, drive security, drive interfaces, channel, and applications. The conference is based on short presentations by the speakers which are well prepared and concise. The result is a dense set of information across a range of topics on storage technology and its application.
Samsung – Weathering the Storm
Jim Elliott, VP Marketing, Samsung Semiconductor, described that in spite of the storm of the global recession that Solid State Drive (SSD) will emerge in 2009 and continue to play a leading role in the storage market beyond 2009. The talk included the following:
In spite of the bleak economic assessment today this pales in comparison with the Great Depression. From 1929 to 1933 40% of US banks failed and individuals lost everything, while in 2008 there were <20 banks taken over by the FDIC and no funds lost. There are 8,451 FDIC insured banks and this represents <.2% of all banks.
There are significant financial rescue plans for the US, EU and China which will spend $Trillions. There is also a refinancing boom going on which will eventually lead to a drive in discretionary spending.
But there are downsides. The financial crisis in the US is spreading around the world. Both corporate and consumer spending is weakening. Disposable income is decreasing and consumer confidence is at a all time low. GPD growth rates are negative in the US, EU and Japan.
This is directly impacting CE markets. The mobile phone is expected to decline at -1%, the PC will grow at 0% top 4% but this is only due to the growth of the netbook growth and DTV may achieve 14%, driven in part by the transition to digital in 2009.
The memory market is in terrible shape. Manufacturers of memory have lost an aggregate of $12.8B in the last 6 quarters. This has had a profound impact on CAPEX and supply. In 2007 CAPEX peaked at $30B or 53% of revenue and it is expected to decline to $13B and only 26% of revenue.
NAND is making significant strides in penetrating the CE market. This began with DSC, digital still cameras, then to phones and MP3 players and now in 2009 the significant penetration into PCs and enterprise computers.
Smart phones are the key to growth in the mobile market. It is expected that North America will be the major buyer of these phones and 150M will sell in 2009. But growth will be about 7% in 2009 compared to past growth rates of 32%.
PMP have replaced MP3 players as the personal media devices. PMP is expected to grow at 7% in 2009 with approximately 120m units.
Car navigation is expected to achieve a 36% growth in 2009 to 90m units. This will be largely independent of the automobile industry where only 12m of those units will be in-dash.
The Flash card and USB memory market has multiple aspects. While there are 2.7 cards present per camera the mobile phone market has only a .3% attach rate of memory cards and represents a potential growth market.
The rising star for NAND Flash application is SSD. It has the following advantages over HDD:
Higher performance
Greater reliability
Less Power consumption
Less heat
Reduced hardware footprint and
Easier recycling.
Key 2009 positions in the market include:
256GB capacity
Superior speed and
Full Disk encryption
SSDs are in a unique position to dominate the performance category in the SATA 3.0 interface. While multiple vendor SSD products have shown full use of the SATA 3.0 disk performance at 250MB/s for sequential R/W HDD have remain stalled at 50MB/s.
In the notebook category the pricing of SSD, at the retail level is <5X that of HDD. At 128GB MLC SSD can be bought for $320.
Lifetime has always been a concern of Flash and if an SSD of 256GB is used at 29GB/day it will last 112 years.
SSD is now entering the notebook market with optimized designs using this technology. An example of such systems are the Lenovo X300 and X301 products. The next step will be full SSD integration, possibly to the motherboard.
It is expected that the notebook attach rate for SSD will reach 3% in 2009 and grow to 35% by 2012.
The enterprise market is ripe for penetration of SSD. One of the reasons is green. The CO footprint of data centers is currently greater than the footprints of the countries of Argentina, Netherlands and Malaysia. It is projected that 90% of the data centers will need more power and cooling in the next 30 months. SSD offers a means to decrease the power consumption of data centers.
In terms of IOPS SSD has and average of 11X performance increase over HDD. Samsung has announced a 100GB Enterprise SSD which has 25,000 Read IOPS and 6,000 Write IOPS.
SSDs offer for the data center 16X the $/IOPS performance and 187X in IOPS/W over HDD.
These factors lead Samsung to predict that the enterprise attach rate for SDD will reach 2% in 2009 and grow to 20% in 2012.
Tom Coughlin – Market Assessment of Storage Technologies
Tom Coughlin is the organizer of Storage Visions and usually gives two presentations on the state of the industry. His thoughts included the following.
Digital technologies allow for new ways to create, share and use content – which is essential to preserving memories – and will be the basis of the next economy.
This is demonstrated by recent history. From 2003 to 2008 there was an increase of storage of 189 EB which created a $13.6B revenue increase. This was supported by a 17.6% ASP decline and the average cost/GB declining to $1.72. The present prices are much lower.
Content sharing is important in the growth for storage usage. It is now easy to share content with multiple on-line resources, new methods of creating metadata and new ways to share and coordinate outside the home.
It is projected that the average home will have 9TB of data by 2013. This means that the total US storage will be 900EB, of this 21EB will be user generated.
The total user generated content will exceed commercial content by 2010.
Life logs are expected to be a major driver in the generation of user content.
The cost for storing 1PB on HDD is $166,000 up front and is $16,000 to maintain. But this will dramatically decline over the next 20 years and over 50% of the cost of storage will happen in the first year.
It is expected that the following will emerge in 2009:
2TB 3.5”
700+GB 2.5”
300GB+ 1.8”
NetPC – The Role of Storage
Andy Higginbotham, Director of HDD Sales and Marketing, Samsung Semiconductor, gave an excellent overview of the NetPC market dynamics around storage. His talk included the following.
Samsung did a retail analysis of NetPCs on sale at retail. From there was a significant shift in the NetPC’s from the $349 to $279 price point. The $279 PC has Linux and 4GB of Flash storage for the OS while the $349 NetPC has a 120GB HDD and Windows XP.
A buyer survey was also done. There was general favorable assessment of these computers but the buyers found that on the $279 computer they ending up purchasing an external HDD. The analogy was drawn to the early DSC that one expected a Flash card with the camera but eventually the buyers purchased their own flash cards for image storage.
An interesting plot was shown of the price dynamics of the NetPC class with traditional laptops. It is expected that the NetPC will reach $249 price bottom and by 2012 the price of a traditional laptop will reach $279.
One of the issues in these NetPCs is that the HDD has a major impact on the size and price of the unit. A 2.5” HDD needs at least 66cm3 and takes 15% of the power. While Flash will not take a slot and has low power drain.
A Trendfocus market estimate was provided that shows NetPCs reaching nearly 40m units by 2010. Of these 85% will require external storage.
The conclusion was drawn that the internal storage favors SSD due to the low cost based on the low memory requirements for OS support only. While external storage favors HDD due to the low cost/GB.
SanDisk looks at Netbook Computers
Don Barnetson, Senior Director of Marketing, SanDisk examined the Netbook computer market and the role of SSD.
In 2007 only 1/2m units were sold and this rose to 8m units in 2008.
One of the problems with the early Netbook computers, which used SSD, was the slow performance. This issue is being addressed with new SSD designs. SanDisk now has a storage card which can go into the Netbook which has from 8GB to 64GB, uses SATA and PATA interfaces and has performance faster than HDD. Pricing is at parity with a 32GB 2.5” HDD.
It is expected that 2009 will be a turning point for the Netbooks. SanDisk estimates that there will be 32m units sold. In the price band from $199 to $249 there will be the Linux OS and these will have 100% SSD. As the price rises to $249 to $499 these computers will have Windows XP and SSD and HDD will compete for a presence.
BluRay Trends
Paul Liao, Panasonic, described storage trends from a CE manufactures perspective. Some of the points he made included the following.
When it comes to consumer spending $ for televisions in NA in 2009 there will be 0$ spent on SD, 50% on HD and 50% on 1080p. This will change by 2011 to 35% on HD and 65% to 1080p.
The introduction of full HD consumer video cameras has revolutionized the creation of home movie content. These cameras are flash card based and with the ability to rapidly create BluRay disks or plug the flash card directly into the television there is immediate satisfaction from the collection of family video.
When consumers own these high quality TVs they view HD programming. A recent survey showed that over 65% of the programming was viewed in HD.
BluRay has made significant gains in consumer purchase. Of the top 20 titles released nearly 16% are being bought in BluRay when either DVD or BluRay can be bought.
Surprisingly it was shown that when the price is the same buyers favored the BluRay disk 60% of the time over down load. Even when the download was $5 less the buyers still liked the BluRay silver disk 55% over down load.
BD-Live enables titles to have the ability to support IM, video messaging, multiplayer puzzles, events and gain rewards. Already over 30 titles support this.
For the movie Dark Night when the director Christopher Nolan participated on a BD Live event over 100,000 accepted the BD Live invitation. Apparently the servers crashed due to the load, when this happened on December 18, 2008.
Hollywood is making the transition to 3D. By 2010 over 30 titles will be produced. Disney has announced by 2010 all of its production will be in 3D.
It is claimed that a 3D box office release will net 3X to 4X the revenue of a non-3D movie.
It is Panasonic’s position that 3D to the consumer not have any compromises from the theater release.
Dark Cloud on the Horizon for NAND Flash
Jim Handy, Objective Analysis highlighted the issue that the NAND flash memory technology is reaching it potential end of scaling with process technology. The ability to scale is important to match the impacts of Moore’s Law and the improvements in disk technology over time. But NAND will stop scaling, possibly as early as 16nm. When this happens the cost per bit will remain the same for lower process technologies. There is the potential for new NAND technologies but there are few details and the price is expected to be higher. This ride of continual lower cost NAND, just like the scaling of process technology in memory and processors, may not continue in NAND memory.
WAVE Comments
There was much talk of the gloomy economic environment. The strong hope is that this will turn around by the 2nd half of 2009 but no one knows. The pace of technology will enable new uses for storage technology, especially as the industry makes the transition to SSD. Real progress is also being made in mass deployment of full disk encryption. As long as the economy will support even moderate growth, storage technology promises to enable new devices which are mobile, on the desktop or home and in the enterprise.
The NetPC and Netbook computers are the shining light in the otherwise bleak economic environment. But this should be as no surprise. Consumers are getting greater value for a known commodity. This is just price elasticity. But as shown at Storage Visions there are two major differences between these computers: widespread adoption of Linux as an accepted OS and the emergence of SSD in high volume. Both provide the means to continue to scale this market to lower costs and higher volume. Right now it is hard to tell a NetPC from a standard low end laptop but we expect to see this change. With volume it will be possible to bring new design elements to the NetPC. Further the OEMs will be able to adapt Linux faster than Windows is changing. Thus, the product innovation pace could significantly increase in the NetPC, more than the traditional PCs.
If there was a consistent theme at Storage Visions it was the rapid pace that SSD is happening. Uniformly across the talks, 2009 is seen as the break out year. Two major factors are present to cause this: performance on parity with HDD and pricing which is at 5X or less of HDD. Thus, SSD will go into niche markets, such as the low cost NetPCs and high end servers. This is an exciting time for the transition in storage technology as a new era of completion with HDD emerges.
In the storage world SSD has a green message with lower power consumption. But underlying many of the talks at Storage Visions was the need to lower power consumption. It was cited that data centers in the US used more power than all the televisions. There is little question that the carbon footprint will become increasingly important. Even here at Storage Visions it was evident.
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