Western Digital is an industry-leading provider of storage technologies and solutions that enable people to create, leverage, experience and preserve data. The company addresses ever-changing market needs by providing a full portfolio of compelling, high-quality storage solutions with customer-focused innovation, high efficiency, flexibility and speed. In an interaction with Khalid Wani, Managing Director Sales, Western Digital Corporation India about the SSD market and key technology trend.
Why SSD market is growing?
The Indian storage market is dominated by HDDs however in the recent past we have observed an increase in SSD adoption. Determining the right storage solution involves consideration of multiple factors to choose the option that is best suitable for you/ your enterprise. There are several important factors to consider, since every buyer has their own requirements, preferences and budgets. That said there are some areas where we see trends of increased SSD adoption. Let us consider consumers such as PC enthusiasts and gamers, who are looking for compact gaming PCs that adhere to their LAN requirements.They, require SSDs for improved performances. SSDs not only provide a faster boot time, the small form factor of these devices enable consumers to get these features in an ultra-thin laptop or notepad.
Consider enterprise data storage, as digital transformation of businesses takes place and organizations move to the cloud, there is a need for enhanced storage solutions. They look for solutions with low latency, faster boot time, high read and write speeds and low TCO to store large files. The increasing need to couple performance with high capacity at affordable costs gave rise to hybrid flash array technology, which was a combination of flash storage and HDDs. This technology combines the high-performance capabilities of SSDs to the high capacity provided by HDDs. Hybrid technology aids all the above requirements in a cost-effective manner making it a go-to solution.
Which segments will drive the demand for SSDs in India?
The adoption of SSD technology by organizations ranges across sectors such as e-commerce to cloud service provider companies, owing to the ever increasing data growth. System Integrators, who create high performing systems for PC enthusiasts and gamers amongst others, have also played a critical role in driving the demand for SSDs in India.
At least the following two broad segments help drive the demand for SSD products. Namely, Mainstream Segment: These are the less tech savvy consumers who primarily use laptops or desktops to perform basic office functions or for everyday use such as surfing the net, storing multimedia files etc. Here, the demand is for a storage solution.
Performance Segment: These are products targeted at tech enthusiasts who make use of intensive applications to create content, gamers, photographers, and PC enthusiasts who require strong storage backups. These are consumers who look for premium solutions that cater to their requirements such as high performance, reliability, speed, efficiency, etc.
How Durability, Form Factor and Speed is making a difference?
Western Digital Corporation delivers innovative storage solutions to consumers, catering to every requirement. The durability, form factor and speed of products that the brands offer are designed specific to the needs of their target audience. For small or medium sized businesses the NAS systems need storage solutions that provide higher capacity and performance that adheres to the increasing storage needs. The WD Red and WD Red Pro HDD line up provide these features to the consumers through their 10TB capacity model. These are some of the product offerings that WDC provides, each with specifications catering to the variety of customer requirements. A close look at each of these would indicate how a different specification can allow the brand to leverage a different target segment and expand their consumer base.
Key technology trend that will generate more demand of SSD’s for Enterprise and end user consumer?
Part of the demand for SSDs in the enterprise or consumer market has been facilitated by the technological developments and their need for advanced and more efficient storage solutions.
Migrating to digital platforms: The gradual migration of organizations to digital platforms has helped them to expand their customer base, make operations faster and simpler to handle, however to ensure that these platforms are sturdy, smart and reliable there is an innate need for storage ecosystems with high performance, high speed read and write options, and a very low TCO in place.
Data Explosion: The increasing number of smart devices be it phones, laptops or tablets has resulted in their users accessing, generating and modifying a large amount of data. To manage this data there is a need for solutions that can provide faster access to this data, durability and reliability.
Cloud Solutions: A lot of companies, including start-ups and e-commerce based organizations, look at third party cloud service providers to help solve their storage solutions need. This calls for continuous innovation in the features that these platforms provide.
Internet of Things: The developments in the field of IoT are taking place continuously and in order to ensure that these innovations and implementation of this technology are taking place seamlessly, a storage solution that is fast, durable and reliable is needed.
In conjunction to all of the above trends a key technological development in the storage industry that continues to be a significant part of the overall enterprise storage market is Hybrid flash array. This technology makes use of a combination of flash storage and HDDs to provide the consumers with the ability to blend capacity and performance together in a cost effective manner. The all flash market has managed to attract attention through the continuous developments in technology. However, reports suggest that the hybrid flash array market holds around 38.4% of the overall market share and is growing.
