HDD industry to deliver 3lk petabytes of storage

FRAMINGHAM, USA: Despite trying economic times, and an unprecedented decline in hard disk drive (HDD) terabyte shipments for enterprise applications in 2009, HDD vendors forged ahead by introducing new HDD products/form factors that address both current and future enterprise storage market requirements.

According to a new research from International Data Corporation (IDC), HDD shipments for enterprise applications will increase from 40.5 million units in 2009 to 52.6 million units in 2014.

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Moreover, the HDD industry will ship more petabytes for enterprise applications in the next two years than it did in the preceding 20 years.

Several ongoing trends will continue to impact enterprise HDD market revenue over the forecast period, including a continued shift away from higher cost performance-optimized HDDs to lower cost capacity-optimized solutions and solid state drives (SSDs) to complement HDDs in storage systems.

HDD revenue derived from enterprise markets will grow at only a 1.7 percent CAGR during this time. Additionally, there will be an increased effort among end users to better utilize existing storage system assets.

"We're definitely seeing intensive cost cutting measures among end users striving to bring more efficiency to current solutions," said John Rydning, research director, Storage Mechanisms: Disk. "The employment of technologies such as data deduplication, thin provisioning, storage multitiering, and storage virtualization are all contributing to reducing end-user costs."

The transition from 3.5in. to 2.5in. performance-optimized form factor HDDs will be complete by 2012.

Growing interest in new storage delivery models such as storage as a service, or storage in the cloud is likely to put greater storage capacity growth demands on Internet datacentres.

The price per gigabyte of performance-optimized HDD storage will continue to decline at a rate of approximately 25 percent to 30 percent per year.