Market Updates

HPE leveraging its position in flash storage market

May, 2019

Globally, the Flash storage market is growing at a rapid pace and it is transforming the storage ecosystem in the IT infrastructure of organization. The flash storage is also considered as one of the important elements of hybrid IT. The size and complexity of flash storages varies from portable USB drives, smartphones, cameras, and embedded systems to enterprise-class all-flash arrays (AFAs). The acquisition of Nimble compliments the offerings from HPE and is expected to strengthen the position of HPE, with all-flash segment growing more than 20% CAGR from 2015 to 2020.

Advantages


  • Complementary offering: Nimble’s offering of small to midrange solutions is expected to strengthen and add value in offering a full range of solutions with HPE’s scalable midrange to high-end 3PAR solutions and affordable MSA products.

  • Strengthening its overall product portfolio: HPE incorporated Nimble’s InfoSight predictive analytics across its storage portfolio to provide better and simplified support functions.


Conclusion

The next storage transformation in storage is aimed at autonomous storage. HPE started integrating InfoSight predictive analytics with HP’s 3PAR. The InfoSight solution can analyse millions of sensor data points in seconds and it automatically resolves 86% of the issues prior to customer identification of faults in the system. HPE also expects hybrid storage i.e., combination of flash and disk storage to get adopted by many organizations for managing the non-performing sensitive primary and secondary workloads.

While the slower spinning drives with 5,400 and 7,200 rpm drives contributes to the majority share of the market are doing well in the market currently, drives that spin at 10,000 or 15,000 rpm that are getting replaced by SSDs and flash memories. With flash memories getting cheaper every day, the market for disk storage is expected to witness a steep decline in the near future.

In the next stage, the flash manufacturers are moving from 2D to 3D owing to the increase in the density of chips. SSD makers are focusing on technologies that get data on and off the SSDs much faster. Also, with the introduction of NVMe in SSDs, it acts as a pipeline between flash memory chips and PCIe slot, making it faster for applications that require ultra-low latency.



– Swarup Bhowal
ICT – Research Analyst
Infoholic Research