Flash storage adoption to increase as cost comes down

Vivek Tyagi, Director – Business Development, India & SEA – SanDisk, talks about the adoption of flash storage in Indian businesses.

What trends to you see in the enterprise storage market in India?

One trend is that of the emergence of cloud storage. Lot of companies are moving their data to the cloud. Few years back, there were concerns in moving data to the cloud.  But I think today everyone sees the value that cloud offers.

Cloud services providers and the other data center companies in enterprise space are moving towards flash as a storage medium as opposed to spinning disk that has been the case for the last 30 years.

The reason for these trends is that flash is providing much higher performance, much lower power consumption, and as the businesses go online, the need for performance is growing.

Uptake of flash storage by Indian enterprises vs developed markets

I would say there is a bit of lag, as is with many technologies we have seen. But, the lag is reducing. If we consider 2014-15 to be the year of flash storage in data centers in the developed world, I am seeing 2015-16 as years for adoption of flash or solid state storage in India. Hopefully, next year, we will see a lot more enterprises moving to solid state drives.

Cost as a bottleneck for flash storage adoption

Cost is probably the number one bottleneck. Few years back, flash as a technology was prohibitively expensive – both, from a global, and India perspective. Flash manufacturing companies are cutting down cost (of flash storage) by moving from 24 nanometer process down to 19 nanometer process from last year. This year, some of the leading companies like us are shipping 15 nanometer flash. As we shrink the geometry of these semiconductor devices, costs rapidly come down.

If you look at the forecast from some of the market research companies, they are expecting that cost of flash storage per gigabyte will be very close to that of hard disks by 2017. That would be the tipping point for the whole industry.

Are Indian channel partners competent to address storage needs of customers today?

In terms of service levels, the channel partners are absolutely top class. No comments there.

In other markets, channel partners act as system integrators as well. Here I see a bit of a gap in India. Since there are multiple technologies in the market, the channel partners could put together a solution for their customers using multiple technologies, instead of mostly going for one-box solutions. If they can act as system integrators, that would be excellent.

How does Sandisk approach channel partner training?

Firstly, we have a dedicated website for our partners where partners can register and have access to latest training materials, whitepapers, data sheets, etc. If a partner needs to propose our storage in a particular segment, they can download whitepapers from our website and used it as a case study, where the (prospective) customer can see that the technology has been used successfully in the same segment earlier.

Then there are quarterly trainings we provide at our facility. Since flash a new technology, we invest a lot in training.

Which industries present maximum opportunity for storage products / solutions ?

From an India perspective, there are many segments that are attractive for storage. For example, IT/ITES where larges SI companies are in the global infrastructure solutions market. Also, BFSI is one of the largest segments for storage, and we are currently looking to connect more with this segment.

At the moment, we are focused on a couple of segments. One is of course, the e-commerce industry. This industry is growing rapidly. We are focusing on this segment because they are ready to adopt new technologies, they are willing to experiment. They need high performance also. Since their business is online, they need high performance – high IO, low latency – at the backend. Our products fit very well with this segment.

The other segment we are looking at is cloud service providers, who provide hosting services to other businesses. They (cloud providers) cater to different workloads and hence need to be ready with high performance, low latency and low power consumption. Our technology fits very well into this requirement as well.

These are the priority segments currently, but going forward, we’ll be working with other segments as well.

Flash storage adoption in the consumer segment

The lack of adoption is due to lack of awareness of what flash can do.  For instance, a flash upgrade of a hard disk on a three year old laptop can make the device more reliable, faster, and improve battery life – there may be no need to upgrade the laptop itself, since it is the hard disk this is most likely to fail. Many consumers are not aware of benefits like this.

The other reason for low adoption is price. India a price sensitive market, and many of the laptops in the consumer space have a huge price difference for versions that come with an SSD. This difference is reducing, and by 2017, it should be very low.

In 2014, 40% of the corporate laptops shipped worldwide went with solid state drives – corporate IT is aware of the benefits of solid state drives. The projection for this year is 60% corporate laptops to ship with SSDs. For consumer laptops, the projection is only 15%, and it could be lower in India. So, as time progresses and solid state prices come close to hard disk drives’, and awareness increases, the flash adoption will be like a hockey stick curve that is about to take off in the next two years.