Electrifying boon for storage devices

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Hybrid hard drives for mass storage will increasingly emerge as a high value solution

Rajesh Khurana,
Country Manager, Seagate Technologies

With the explosion in user generated digital content, Internet penetration and emergence of digital devices that require backup in many forms, storage is finding newer applications and usages in new verticals. Nearly 44% of Seagate revenue is being generated from the Asia-Pac & India is a key focus area for Seagate.

In the coming years we’re going to witness exciting developments in storage market – in terms of technology & products as well as emerging verticals. This will be true globally, and India will be no exception. The traditional market in India (PC and enterprise storage segment) will continue to grow and is still the prime segment in volumes. IDC has estimated that the country is now consuming 2.5 million PCs per quarter and this is still a growth market. The Indian server market for instance sees a growth rate of 15% year-on-year.

But now we will see the emergence of new applications consequent to increasingly digital lifestyles, professional & personal digital storage going mobile and data of all kinds – personal photographs, videos and music, work-related data, enterprise information, all being on demand – anytime, anywhere. Consider this – Gartner has estimated that half of business travelers by 2012 will not be carrying their laptops with them when they move. This could give rise to an entirely new class of “pocketable” devices – UMPCs, mobile Internet devices, high-end smartphones, personal entertainment devices.

Among the newer emerging application areas will be digital video surveillance systems, rapidly becoming ubiquitous, empowering a broad variety of security solutions throughout banking/finance, casinos/gaming, retail/commercial, corporate, government (internal security, law enforcement). All of these will be storage-enabled. The hotel industry alone will spend $82 billion on electronic security. Consumer electronics (CE) is another emerging field of application. The rapid acceptance of digital entertainment and a need to store those files in an inexpensive medium is accelerating HDD integration into CE products. Improved broadband speeds enable home networking, which lets consumers tap a PC’s hard drive for storage. The gaming market, both with portable devices as well as networked/web-based gaming, is just taking off in a big way. HDDs for the gaming devices demand a combination of capacity and size.

SMEs are now looking for cost-effective storage solutions, particularly in the NAS and SAN applications. The established brands often are unable to provide the economical solutions where investment may be in line with what SMBs generally plan for their annual outlay on IT infrastructure. This is emerging as a huge market opportunity.

One of the most revolutionary pointers to the future is the move towards ‘green computing.’ We’ll see the emergence of ‘hybrid’ hard drives for mass storage in certain applications as a key technology trend. Hybrid drives, essentially offer a combination of magnetic media based storage and flash storage. While traditional HDDs remain the largest part of market, hybrids will increasingly emerge as a high value solution. IDC estimates that by 2012, shipments of storage drives (currently at around 400 million units) would go up to about 850 million units per year. And approx. 12-15 % of these would be hybrid drives.

At Seagate, we’ll continue to look at new and emerging market segments that are poised to grow exponentially in India – these include the application-specific hard drives for consumer electronics segment, the security and surveillance segment and the very demanding gaming segment. Seagate will also see the further expansion of the recently introduced initiative of retail access points in smaller towns, this will take its brand directly to consumers in such locations.

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2008

An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

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