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By enabling faster system performance and reducing the footprint and energy consumption of storage system architectures, flash storage has gained the confidence of the enterprises in India
SanDisk, one of the world’s largest players in consumer data storage, recently launched it’s enterprise flash storage suite in India. The enterprise flash storage products that SanDisk provides worldwide continue to be popular in India. “We offer enterprise SSD, SATA & SAS and PCIe. Also, software solutions like Flashsoft (caching), Zetascale and also InfiniFlash, which is an all Flash array with up to 512TB capacity in one 3U box,” says Vivek Tyagi, Director – Business Development & Sales, SanDisk India – Enterprise & OEM sales, SanDisk.
As SanDisk is working globally with OEMs like Dell, HP, IBM, Cisco, many of their products are embedded with subsystems provided by SanDisk. Components like flash based SSD or PCIe cards go along with the server or storage box solutions developed by these companies.
Currently, the Indian enterprise flash storage has well-established players like HP, IBM and EMC, and now these companies will have to contend with a new competitor, SanDisk, in the enterprise flash storage market.
Demand for Enterprise Flash Storage
The demand for enterprise flash is being driven by the increasing adoption of Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud (SMAC). As Indian companies develop their strategies for tackling the SMAC phenomenon, they find that the deployment of flash is of great importance. “Digital data is growing exponentially in every DC and the failure to efficiently manage this data is one of the key things that slows down the infrastructure. This has direct bearing on the entire IT environment and on the business,” says Dan Baigent, Senior Director, Strategic Business Development and Global Technology EcoSystem, SanDisk. According to one statistic, Amazon can lose 1% of it’s revenue for every 100 milliseconds of latency—this is clearly a massive impact on business.
Flash storage is one way of tackling this problem and safeguarding the business. “Enterprise flash storage is all set to grow and transition the storage landscape to support the accessibility and efficiency needs of future. As applications grapple with performance and latency issues, flash storage is fast becoming the norm to address these in real time,” says Gaurav Sharma, Research Manager- Enterprise, IDC India. Santhosh Rao, Principal Research Analyst, Gartner says, “From the perspective of the Indian market, there continues to be a significant amount of interest for enterprise SSDs in the banking, telecom and manufacturing segments where the discussion is led by requirements for lower latencies and ensuring higher availability and performance. There are great opportunities for deployment in Online Transaction Processing (OLTP), analytics and highly virtualized environments that include (but are not limited to) cloud data centers. Deployments are possible in database, data warehousing and high-performance computing environments, and in hosted virtual desktop infrastructure (HVDI) environments,”
The performance issues of the IT environment of any company requires a different kind of handling. “SanDisk works with it’s Independent Software Vendor (ISV) partners like Microsoft, VMware and Oracle, in listing out the IO and latency related issues of the end user. After having a point by point dialogue, we best apply our technology to solve the issues,” says Baigent of SanDisk. SanDisk also brings the subject matter expertise from it’s five acquisitions.
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Riding on Acquisitions
India has many players in the flash storage market, but SanDisk is the clear market leader. Since its inception SanDisk has been focused on flash. “The company pretty much invented NAND flash from its beginning in the consumer world,” states Baigent of SanDisk. Add up the five acquisitions—SMART Storage System, Schooner, Flashsoft, Pliant Technology and it’s latest- Fusion-io and on top of that, the products and solutions that we now have in our enterprise portfolio— there is no one else who covers that,” claims Baigent.
Other companies providing flash storage solutions are not necessarily flash memory manufacturers. “SanDisk is fundamentally a flash memory manufacturer. Starting from wafer fab in Japan to another factory in Shanghai, to a SSD manufacturing set-up in Malaysia—we are fully vertically integrated. We have full control over supply, quality and cost. This is the primary differentiating factor for us,” says Tyagi of SanDisk.
The pricing depends on the kind of solution purchased. The scenarios can range from the deployment of SAS SATA as a disk replacement; installing of PCIe which is in the server and closer to memory; implementation of shared storage device like ‘Infini flash’.
According to IDC, the global enterprise flash storage market is around $13.3 billion currently. The market is expected to grow by CAGR of 11.5% in 2013-18.
Gartner is of the view that the Indian market for enterprise flash storage will be of around $450 million by 2018. In the same year, the APAC market for flash storage will be of $3 billion and the global market will stand at $13.3 billion. It is interesting to see how fast the market is growing—for instance, in 2014, the global enterprise market was $5.7 billion, the APAC market was $1.25 billion and the Indian market was worth a mere $170 million.
The companies that were first in implementing SanDisk’s flash storage are mostly those that are providing data centre or cloud as a service in India. These are companies, which build data centres for renting out or leasing out to other companies.
In Q1 of 2015, SanDisk has invested $0.9 billion in R&D. The company’s Bengaluru facility is the second largest SanDisk R&D centre, outside of the USA—the centre currently employs around 600 people. The facility has over 20 patents to its credit. Sharma of IDC says, “SanDisk enjoys the advantage of having partnerships with many OEMs selling the arrays. The company also owns lot of intellectual property, which enables it to develop innovative flash products. The investments in R&D result in products that are durable and reliable.”
Beyond Flash
There is no doubt that the enterprise grade flash is more durable, reliable and has higher read/write speeds. Having no moving parts, the flash based drives consume less power, generate less heat and do not create any noise. But flash must not be seen as an answer to every performance related problem that the enterprises face. The perception that Flash can be a panacea for every performance related issue is false.
“Flash is strictly meant for selected performance hungry, variable workloads. There are various use cases for flash storage. For instances in a VDI environment, in indexing of data, etc. Flash is also the most suitable option in a high transaction processing database. CTOs, who want to solve their performance related problems overnight, should try to deploy the server side flash solution. Looking for a short implementation time for solving the performance related challenge? – Server side SSD can be the answer. If the requirement is to manage a highly variable workload, you can look at an all flash array,” says Rao of Gartner.
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