Flash vs HDD: Demand too large for either to cater alone

BANGALORE, INDIA: Rajesh Khurana, country manager, Seagate India in an interaction with Deepa Damodaran of CIOL shares his view on what will drive enterprise storage device market. Excerpts:

CIOL: Going forward what will be the trend in servers and storage arrays? Will they be on flash drives or hard disk drives?

Rajesh Khurana: The advent of cloud computing has given rise to trends such as consumerization of IT, big data and enterprise mobility. These have created increasingly connected data ecosystems, and they are driving demand for digital storage capacity.

Utilizing only one type or tier of storage does not meet all needs without compromise. If cost and space capacity were not of primary concern, the simple solution would be to use only SSDs for cloud storage. On the other hand, if performance were not a concern, using only high-capacity HDDs would be an ideal cloud storage option. Likewise, if power, cooling, cabinet space and floor loading were not a concern along with high performance or high capacity, using only traditional HDDs would be a reasonable solution.

There is more than just cost per capacity or capacity density to consider when determining the type of enterprise storage to use for cloud environments. Certainly space capacity measured in gigabytes and terabytes (or on a large-scale deployment basis, petabytes) are important characteristics of data storage to consider. However, there are other attributes and characteristics that should inform purchasing decisions, depending on the application, workload or usage scenario.

So the magic comes in being able to deploy the right drives or mix of drives to meet service level agreements (SLAs).

CIOL: How big is flash drive market as against hard disks? How fast is it growing?

Rajesh Khurana: Manufacturers shipped 524 million disk drives in 2012, according to iSuppli, more than ten times the 39 million flash drives. Global manufacturing capacity for drives at the end of 2012 came to around 1,25,000 petabytes per quarter, compared to around 10,000 petabytes per quarter for flash. By volume, hard drives are tough to beat.

Flash shipments will grow from 39 million units in 2013 to 83 million units. By 2016, 239 million flash drives will be shipping annually, propelled by sales of tablets, smart phones and notebooks. Enterprise arrays based on flash will also gain a stronger following among corporate buyers like banks with an excruciating need for speed.

CIOL: Other than laptops and smartphones, when it comes to enterprises, where will they be used more?

Rajesh Khurana: In enterprises, most servers will come with a traditional drive or a hybrid drive along with a flash-based PCIe card to accelerate the flow of data. Flash-based storage arrays will handle the most time-sensitive jobs, but be backed by even larger arrays of disks.

CIOL: Flash is said to be the better technology, however, it is still not a huge market? Why?

Rajesh Khurana: Economics play a role. It is simply far less expensive to manufacture drives. A new facility for producing hard drives costs about $35 to $50 million and can be operational in about four months. A similar NAND flash factory that can produce 1,00,000 wafers a month cost $4 billion and takes two years to build. It would take $210 billion in factory investments to displace 15 per cent of the demand for drives in 2014, according to Gartner. Partly, as result, drives will invariably cost less. By 2016, a one to two terabyte drive will cost OEMs $39 to $45, according to Gartner, while a 300GB SSD drive will cost $90 to $100. This does not make sense.

Displacing all of the demand for drives would take over a trillion dollars of new investment. Besides being impractical, a sudden surge in investment would likely plunge the semiconductor industry into a massive slump.

CIOL: What all needs to be addressed for flash to play a significant role in enterprise and storage segments?

Rajesh Khurana: The enterprise SSD marketplace is still in its early stages of growth, with more suppliers than the market can profitably support. Vertical integration or strategic sourcing arrangements and processes that ensure adequate supply of high-quality NAND are also critical. Vendors without these things will struggle to survive. Industry consolidation is inevitable.

With the multitude of vendors, there is a wide array of product offerings, ranging from simple, client SSDs to complex, high-performance solutions for niche enterprise markets. In addition, many vendors inaccurately claim that client SSDs deliver the same performance and endurance benefits as enterprise SSDs. This causes marketing confusion, fragments the enterprise SSD market and inhibits growth.

For the enterprise SSD market to achieve its full potential, product offerings must be purpose- built for the enterprise, seamlessly integrate with existing infrastructures and adhere to widely adopted industry standards. Client products are not designed for the strenuous 24.7 operations of the enterprise, and fall short by orders of magnitude in their ability to deliver the consistent performance, high endurance and interoperability needed for complex, heavy workloads.

Likewise, solutions for niche enterprise markets do not meet the broader needs of enterprise environments and do not adhere to industry standards, ultimately creating frustration for any users outside the intended niche. Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and cloud providers need enterprise SSDs that meet the same industry standards and support the same enterprise feature set as enterprise HDDs to simplify integration and interoperability.

They also expect SSD suppliers to provide the same product quality and reliability, world-class customer service, high-volume manufacturing, and other advantages of a strategic HDD supplier.

CIOL: Which are the new technologies coming in which can make HDDs on par with flash drives?

Rajesh Khurana: The emergence of solid state hybrid drive (SSHD) technology provides a way for users to get more performance from their machines, and run richer applications. SSHDs combine a small, fast and affordable amount of NAND flash memory with a traditional hard drive.

NAND flash memory is a proven storage technology that's been extensively used in digital camera memory cards, USB thumb drives and MP3 players. It also became popular for higher-capacity SSD laptop computer storage to use NAND flash; however, the inability of flash and SSD to handle heavy write-erase cycles keeps their per-gigabyte storage costs high.

The secret to getting the best of both worlds is to use solid state only for what it does best, deliver blazing speed, and partner it with the complementary strengths of conventional hard disk drives (low cost, high capacity, proven reliability) to provide needed capacity. And that is a software issue.

Software solutions featuring self-learning algorithms are designed to deliver an SSD-like response from your favourite applications and files. They dynamically monitor data usage and then intelligently determine what data should be copied to the hybrid drive's solid state memory.

This enables SSD-like performance when accessing a user's most frequently needed files, while reducing the workload (and increasing the reliability) of the solid state storage.

CIOL: Will flash replace HDDs in enterprise segment anytime soon?

Rajesh Khurana: Some debate that in the coming years SSDs will begin to replace hard disk drives in significant numbers of laptops, desktop PCs, enterprise servers and storage solutions. The debate, however, ignores a critical variable that changes the whole tenor of the debate.

And that variable is the rate of data growth. The opportunity and demand is simply too large for either technology alone. When you start to look at it in that context, you can start to see that the future really is not 'Flash versus Disk', instead, it is 'Flash and Disk'. The reality is that SSDs and hybrids complement hard disk drives and together grow overall global TAM and demand for storage.