Year In Review: Flash Comes of Age

If disk is the heavyweight segment of the storage market, dominated by seven vendors--three pure-play (EMC, NetApp and HDS) and four IT generalists (IBM, HP, Dell and Oracle/Sun)--holding more than 80% of the market, then flash (or solid state) is the cocky up-and-comer and 2011 was the year that flash finally made the jump to legitimate contender. And while disk continues to muscle along, accounting for the lion's share of the storage market being driven by data growing at almost 60% per year, the much smaller flash market is undergoing hypergrowth.

While IDC put the enterprise storage systems market up 18% in customer revenue between 2009 and 2010, reaching $30.8 billion in 2010, it was projected to grow at a 3.9% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between 2010 and 2015, with revenues expected to reach $37.3 billion in 2015. But 2010 saw SSD revenue increase 103.4%, due to strong growth in the enterprise segment, albeit on a smaller base, reports IDC.

The enterprise storage market was expected to grow 13% in the second half of 2011, according to IHS-iSuppli, and while hard disk drives would account for 71% of this revenue, they were only projected to be up 0.9% from the first half of the year. Meanwhile, SSDs would be up 61%, to $1.35 billion from $843 million.

Although solid-state drive technologies and high-speed memory adoption appears to be skyrocketing in the enterprise market, the market will be hotly contested, according to a study from Storage Strategies NOW (SSG-NOW). Accounting for almost half the responses, HP (including 3Par) was the preferred SSD vendor (44.5%), followed by EMC (plus Isilon), IBM, and Fusion-io and NetApp tied for fourth.

Just over half the respondents said they had deployed a drive device format in a new storage array, followed by an appliance attached for access acceleration and drive device format in workstations and laptops. Looking ahead, new storage arrays will dominate (57.1%), followed by workstations and laptops, as well as access acceleration.

The primary drivers for adoption were the need to reduce response times, storage tiering to help throughput and increasing business agility. Key applications for 2011 were headed by database and transactional structured data, followed closely by OTLP and high-performance computing applications. For 2012, data warehousing moves to the top of the list, followed by primary data, Tier 0 storage, and business continuity and disaster recovery.

While mergers and acquisitions are expected to thin the ranks of disk-alternative vendors, there was no shortage of companies offering flash solutions in 2011. Xiotech kicked the year off with an HDD/SSD combination in a 3U form factor that provided more than 60,000 input/output operations per second and could scale to almost 900,000 IOPS in a rack, with 14.4 Tbytes of usable capacity, for a starting price of $100,000.

Seagate, the dominant HDD vendor, refreshed its enterprise SSD lines in March with two new models for its Tier 0 (hot data) Pulsar family. Available in 100G-, 200G-, 400G- and 800-Gbyte capacities, the Pulsar.2 is called the first MLC-enabled SSD designed to meet enterprise reliability requirements. The SLC edition, the Pulsar XT.2, comes in 100G-, 200G- and 400-Gbyte capacities.

Built around the SandForce SF-2200 SSD processor with the 6-Gbps SATA III interface to deliver double the performance of the previous generation, the Vertex 3 from OCZ Technology Group, was announced in April, providing up to 550 Mbytes per second of bandwidth and up to 60,000 IOPS (4k random write). In June, OCZ refreshed its Deneva 2 line of SSDs targeted at mission-critical enterprise applications, upping IOPS throughput from 50,000 to 80,000.

In August, Fusion-io, a vendor of solid-state storage and high-performance I/O solutions, announced 556% higher revenues for its fourth fiscal 2011 quarter. However, the company was up just 7% quarter-over-quarter, and the company said next quarter's revenues would be lower than the previous quarter's. For fiscal 2012, revenues are expected to grow 40%, to $276 million. In October the company announced two new releases that doubled the performance of the first-generation flash offering, with 15-microsecond latency, 900,000 write IOPS, 700,000 read IOPS, 3-Gbyte per second bandwidth, nearly symmetrical read and write access, up to 2.4 Tbytes of capacity and system-level integration with Fusion-io VSL 3.0 software subsystem.

Toward the end of the year, Nimble Storage rolled out a new top-end hybrid iSCSI storage array that combined flash and disk with 50% more capacity and double the cache. The CS260, a primary storage and backup product that costs about $2 per usable gigabyte, delivers 48 Tbytes of effective capacity in a 3U form factor and 2.4 Tbytes of effective flash.

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