The Business of Enterprise Storage will be the Consumer
By Thomas Coughlin, Coughlin Associates - SNIA Member, SNIA SSSI Member

The Growth of Consumer Content
The data storage capacity requirements for consumer devices will increase as part of the economic recovery. This demand is fueled by the availability of inexpensive digital storage devices, increasing interface and Internet bandwidth as well as greater processing power in smaller devices. The combination of developments in these technologies is enabling the availability of greater amounts of content and at higher resolutions. It is also enabling the growth of user generated content at higher and higher resolutions.

The consumer electronics market will be impacted by the overall economy in 2009 and well into 2010 but a recovery in 2011 could drive renewed demand for consumer electronic products and digital storage to support them. In addition, some storage products for the consumer market are still experiencing growth, such as external storage products for homes and small businesses.

By 2014 digital content in an average US home could total almost 12 terabytes [Figure 1] and overall consumer content, including commercial, personal as well as shared content could add up to over 1 zetabyte worldwide.

Figure 1. Accumulated Digital Content in Average American Home

The development of greater direct attached interface speeds and more sophisticated local and remote digital backup and archiving functions is creating a greater capability to protect and preserve personal and commercial content in the home. In some cases the software and services for remote backup even approach the capabilities of true continuous data protection. This is expected to lead to significant growth in external storage for backup and data protection as well as storage expansion (such as DVR expanders). We project that by 2014 the market for small external storage will approach 120 million units using about 150 million disk drives. This includes direct attached as well as network attached storage.

Network attached storage (mostly NAS) will play a more significant role as content sharing becomes more common, network connectivity and management is simplified and more and more consumer devices are built with network connectivity.

The mobile device storage market is favoring flash memory solid state storage, particularly for lower resolution content since it is possible to buy lower capacities of flash memory for prices less than the cheapest hard disk drive. Flash memory has nearly displaced optical disks for music play out for younger users. Hard disk drives are favored for higher resolution media players (especially for video) and higher end camcorders. Hard disk drives might also be required for hypothetical life logs and personal memory assistants-which would swell user generated content. At the same time the bulk of portable media players and lower end camcorders are expected to use primarily flash memory.

Hard disk drives are expected to rule the static consumer applications in most homes since they offer significant amounts of digital storage needed for using content intended for larger screens and for maintaining larger content libraries that are downloaded to mobile devices for temporary use. As discussed earlier hard disk drives will be used for backup and storage expansion and for static consumer applications. Downloading content from the web will also favor hard disk drives since these devices are usually the final repository for any such content that is retained by the user.

Optical discs are struggling to remain competitive for playout of music as well as distribution of various types of video and software content. As Internet bandwidths increase and hard disk capacities grow there will be a trend of declining sales of CDs and DVDs which are now forced to compete against downloaded content. In addition, flash memory $/GB are approaching those of optical disks putting additional pressure on optical disc storage.

The best chance for optical distribution to remain competitive is in higher resolution content since downloading such content is difficult except in higher bandwidth households. We expect that in the next ten years content files of several hundred GB or more could be used by consumers for Ultra-HD, 3D video or even higher resolution content. This could help defend optical disc use but nevertheless optical disc sales are expected to decline for consumer applications over the next few years.

Overall digital storage capacity shipped into homes could reach 900 exabytes. The bulk of this storage capacity will be on hard disk drives, followed by flash memory and then optical discs [Figure 2].

Figure 2. Annual Storage Capacity Shipments for Hard Disk Drives (HDD), Flash Memory (NAND) and Optical Disc Drives (ODD)

Consumer Content will Drive Enterprise Storage
The growing amount of commercial consumer and user generated content will drive the demand for storage in data centers. Today there is more consumer digital content than any other type of content and thus all forms of storage will be impacted by consumer content. Consumer content will be the biggest single driver of digital storage of all types in the next decade. This will impact enterprise storage as well as individual storage devices used in consumer products or external storage used by consumers.

Currently over 65,000 videos per day are uploaded on YouTube and this is expected to grow by 10X over the next few years. Content sharing is growing and all the videos, photos and other shared content needs to be stored on storage systems and will drive enterprise storage system demand. Likewise many companies are offering remote storage (over 1,000 of them before the market crash) and many of these are going after small businesses and even consumers. Consumers can use remote storage to backup and protect their personal content from disasters. As the amount of personal content grows the need to access and protect that content will grow as well.

It will be well for enterprise storage companies to keep their eyes on developments in consumer content and content storage. This may well be the path to future revenues and profits.

Source for this Article: 2009 Digital Storage in Consumer Electronics Report - Tom Coughlin, Coughlin Associates, and Jim Handy, Objective Analysis (http://www.tomcoughlin.com/techpapers.htm).

This report is the eighth report on data storage and emerging applications and the sixth report on data storage and the consumer electronics market published by Coughlin Associates. For more information on the 2009 Consumer Electronics Storage Report and to order a copy please visit the Coughlin Associates web site at http://www.tomcoughlin.com/techpapers.htm.

About the Author
Tom Coughlin, President, Coughlin Associates has been working for over 25 years in the data storage industry at companies such as Ampex, Polaroid, Seagate, Maxtor, Micropolis, Syquest, 3M and other companies. Tom is active in the SNIA, including its Solid State Storage Initiative, which is focused on fostering the growth and success of the market for solid state storage in both commercial and consumer environments. For more information about SNIA's Solid State Storage Initiative, visit www.snia.org/sssi.

Tom has over 60 publications and 6 patents to his credit and is active with IDEMA, the IEEE Magnetics Society, IEEE Consumer Electronics Society, SNIA, SMPTE and other professional organizations. He is the founder and organizer of the Annual Storage Visions Conference (before the International CES), as well as the Creative Storage Conference (before the annual NAB show). Coughlin Associates provides market and technology analysis as well as Data Storage Technical Consulting services. Dr. Coughlin is the author of Digital Storage in Consumer Electronics: The Essential Guide, published by a division of Elsevier. Coughlin Associates publishes reports on digital storage in professional media and entertainment as well as consumer electronics. For more information go to www.tomcoughlin.com.