The movement to hybrid storage, proliferated use of smart phones, laptops, and tablets has increased penetration of storage data management. With early adoption of machine learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Internet of Things (IOT) are influencing the data storage in ways such as lower costs, automation, enhanced security and reliability. The Data Storage Market reached a value of $36 billion in 2018, and is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 21% during the forecast period 2019-2025.
The data storage market is anticipated to grow positively owing to wide applications in enterprises, telecommunication, consumer electronics, Banking, Financial services and Insurance (BFSI), media and entertainment and other (energy, automotive, government, education) industries. Enterprise is a major application segment estimated to grow at a CAGR of 23% during the forecast period 2019-2025. This is due to the larger enterprises such data centers, and e-commerce giants, have started building in-house data storage centers which automatically increase the procurement of data storage devices for various applications.
A study by the International Data Corporation (IDC) found that the total capacity of data stored is increasing by around 60% every year, globally. This is due to secondary storage devices, which are renowned for features including low consumption of electricity, high capacity, and long lifetimes. Recently, technological advancements in flash arrays such as non-volatile memory express over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) are enabling flash drivers such as USB, and memory card devices to be utilized more for data storage and transfer purposes. NVMe shows promise of delivering high bandwidth with ultra-low latency, making it one of the most popular data storage trends of 2019.
Over the last few years, growth of data centers have been increasing in the APAC region. Asia-Pacific (APAC) region held the largest market share of 37% in the global data storage market in 2018.
The data storage semiconductor also known as memory units are increasingly deployed in the areas of data center infrastructure of the countries such as Singapore, Hong Kong, China, India, Japan and others, which is majorly contributing to the overall growth of APAC data storage market.
The latest findings states that the increasing growth in cloud infrastructure, implementation of Solid-State Drives (SSD) and Hard Disk Drives (HDD) in computer applications is anticipated to register a higher amount of share in the upcoming years, which will help the APAC region to continue its growth. Rising adoption of smartphones, combined with an increase in disposable incomes, is leading to a growth in digitalization in developing economies such as China, Japan, Indonesia, Australia, Malaysia, and others.
End users play an important role in creating a substantial market for USB flash drives, and memory cards. These devices have evolved over the past several years as they are platform independent and operable over any kind of operating system. One of the vital reason behind its extensive adoption is its password restricted access and encryption, and control over the data transfer even if the internet connection fails, makes it more likeable in the secondary storage devices.
The increasing usage of digital devices and services by enterprises is likely to result in a huge amount of data, which will compel businesses to leverage cloud computing technologies. Leading companies such as Microsoft Corporation, IBM Corporation, Amazon Web Services, Inc., Samsung Group, and few others are offering advanced cloud computing services to boost the market growth, particularly in the APAC region. Some of the most popular cloud storage solutions for small businesses include Dropbox, Google Drive, Apple iCloud and Microsoft OneDrive in the data storage market.
Data Storage Market Growth Drivers
- Emergence of Interesting Content over the Internet: Increased penetration of the Internet has created a multitude of opportunities for industries such as media and entertainment, and advanced electric devices. Large file sizes of media content such as music, movies, and high-resolution images require high-capacity and high-performance storage devices. The digital transformation of content is creating a huge demand for manufacturers of data storage systems.
- Role of hyper converged storage in enterprise data storage: Hyper-converged storage platform is initially focused on primary storage. The technology creates a solution by eliminating redundant data and storing data in distributed form. Hyper-converged infrastructure brings together data center services to increase computing, networking and storage. This improves the performance efficiency and reduces the operational cost. With increasing need of virtual machines, which requires storage to store applications like operating system, and data. New technologies such as hyper-converged infrastructure provides an alternative for enterprises running VMs and managing the data storage efficiently. The emergence of hyper-converged has provided benefits to enterprises, allowing them to reduce operational cost, and simplify the management and has gained ground on cloud deployment.
R&D Investment and Initiative, Funding
In 2018, Western Digital Corporation, a hard drive manufacturer and data storage company, launched the largest mechanical hard drive for data storage. This a 15TB helium sealed hard disk drive, specifically designed for data centers and cloud storage services. It is envisioned for enterprise customers who are in the need of compact and reliable storage systems. This product is anticipated to increase the demand from enterprises, which in turn will drive the growth of data storage market.
In 2018, Samsung announced plans to invest $16m into R&D over the next three years, with a focus on future growth of secondary data storage management in the South Korean region. In semiconductor products, Samsung will also invest in manufacturing hubs to meet significant demand for semiconductors from the automotive industry, and data centers.
GIGABYTE, a well-known manufacturer of computer hardware components and systems, has entered into the data storage market by partnering with Bigtera to offer high-performance software defined storage solutions. The entrance of this new competitor is anticipated to see continued growth in the data storage market.
Major Players
The major players in the data storage market include Sandisk Corporation, Western Digital, Hitachi Data System Corporation, Samsung Group, IBM Corporation, Amazon Web Services, Inc., Alphabet, Inc., Microsoft Corp., Toshiba Corp, Seagate Technology LLC, IBM Corporation, and others.
Western Digital, a digital storage enterprise which manufactures HDDs, SSDs, and NAND flash memory, and hybrid storage products, has recently acquired two companies namely, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and SanDisk. The acquistion is aimed towards enterprise customers, with increased focus on enterprise storage and enterprise servers.
Conclusion
Putting in all together the characteristics such as performance, capacity, visibility, adaptability of storage technologies are increasingly growing in the sales of server based storage system. The quick adoption of cloud based storage system generally used in the areas of larger enterprise, where majorly primary storage are used is growing at the moment. Same way the increasing end customer of laptops, smartphones are creating significant growth of the flash drives based on NAND, such USB flash driver and memory card is anticipated to see a foreseeable future, where Internet of Things (IoT) have a huge impact on data storage.
