We have been hearing for years that NAND flash is at price parity with disk. But at this week’s Flash Memory Summit, Darren Thomas, VP Storage BU, Micron said at his keynote that NAND only store 5% of the bits in a data center.
Darren’s session was all about how to get flash to become more than 5% of data storage and called this “crossing the chasm”. I assume the 5% is against yearly data storage shipped.
Flash’s adoption rate
Darren, said last year flash climbed from 4% to 5% of data center storage, but he made no mention on whether flash’s adoption was accelerating. According to another of Darren’s charts, flash is expected to ship ~77B Gb of storage in 2015 and should grow to about 240B Gb by 2019.
If the ratio of flash bits shipped to data centers (vs. all flash bits shipped) holds constant then Flash should be ~15% of data storage by 2019. But this assumes data storage doesn’t grow. If we assume a 10% Y/Y CAGR for data storage, then flash would represent about ~9% of overall data storage.
Data growth at 10% could be conservative. A 2012 EE Times article said2010-2015 data growth CAGR would be 32% and IDC’s 2012 digital universe report said that between 2012 and 2020, data will double every two years, a ~44% CAGR. But both numbers could be talking about the world’s data growth, not just data center.
How to cross this chasm?
Geoffrey Moore, author of Crossing the Chasm, came up on stage as Darren discussed what he thought it would take to go beyond early adopters (visionaries) to early majority (pragmatists) and reach wider flash adoption in data center storage. (See Wikipedia article for a summary on Crossing the Chasm.)
As one example of crossing the chasm, Darren talked about the electric light bulb. At introduction it competed against candles, oil lamps, gas lamps, etc. But it was the most expensive lighting system at the time.
But when people realized that electric lights could allow you to do stuff at night and not just go to sleep, adoption took off. At that time competitors to electric bulb did provide lighting it just wasn’t that good and in fact, most people went to bed to sleep at night because the light then available was so poor.
However, the electric bulb higher performing lighting solution opened up the night to other activities.
What needs to change in NAND flash marketing?
From Darren’s perspective the problem with flash today is that marketing and sales of flash storage are all about speed, feeds and relative pricing against disk storage. But what’s needed is to discuss the disruptive benefits of flash/NAND storage that are impossible to achieve with disk today.
What are the disruptive benefits of NAND/flash storage, unrealizable with disk today.
- Real time analytics and other RT applications;
- More responsive mobile and data center applications;
- Greener, quieter, and potentially denser data center;
- Storage for mobile, IoT and other ruggedized application environments.
Only the first three above apply to data centers. And none seem as significant as opening up the night, but maybe I am missing a few.
Also the Wikipedia article cited above states that a Crossing the Chasm approach works best for disruptive or discontinuous innovations and that more continuous innovations (doesn’t cause significant behavioral change) does better with Everett Roger’s standard diffusion of innovation approaches (see Wikepedia article for more).
So is NAND flash a disruptive or continuous innovation? Darren seems firmly in the disruptive camp today.
Comments?
Photo Credit(s): 20-nanometer NAND flash chip, IntelFreePress’ photostream