Where does Storage line up in the SSD Supply picture?

Toward the end of last year there were many reports of NAND shortages. (NAND is the technology behind non-volatile flash memory). There were reports from The Register, tom’s Hardware, storage newsletter and others that the supply shortage of NAND chips is a perfect storm of higher smart phone demand with higher flash memory content, the difficult transition to 3D NAND production, and higher demand for SSDs as the price differential between SSD and HDD approaches parity. Many predict that these shortages will extend well into 2017. Apple announced record earnings this quarter due to the sales of iPhone7, which has twice the memory of the iPhone6, up to 256 GB.  (Just 5 years ago, a 2.5 inch SSD had 250GB). They didn’t give any guidance on memory supply shortages

 

Smart phones take up the majority of NAND supply and smart phone vendors have long term contracts with NAND vendors, so they will have priority on supply. SSD demand has grown over the last few years and is expected to consume nearly 40% of the supply. The SSD Drive market is segmented into at least 8 categories according to IDC.

 

The high volume client markets and the high margin commercial markets are very attractive to the SSD vendors. In the SSD enterprise server market, server vendors will probably pay more for SSDs since a supply shortage in SSDs will mean a delay in delivery of servers. So how much do you expect will be available for external storage array vendors? Some estimate about 7%. Will that be enough to satisfy the surging demand for Flash Storage arrays?

 

For Hitachi Data Systems this is a mute question since we do not depend on SSD vendors for our Flash storage arrays. We build our own Flash Module Drives with components that we source through the buying power of our Hitachi parent. Although we do sell SSD’s for certain configurations the vast majority of flash requirements are filled with the FMD. We are on the third generation of FMD technology and have shipped over 500PB of FMD flash between 3Q 2014 to 3Q2016. We currently sell a 14 TB FMD with embedded encryption and compression with deduplication and compression in the SVOS 7 software which manages all our F (All Flash Array) and G (Hybrid Flash Array) storage systems.

 

If your storage plans are dependent on flash, talk to your Hitachi sales representative or sales partner.

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