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

Future is not flash versus disk, but flash and disk, says Rajesh Khurana of Seagate

Interviews | by CIOL Bureau

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, smartphones and notebooks. Enterprise arrays based on flash will also gain a stronger following among corporate buyers like banks with a pressing need for speed.


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