SSD Market Analysis: NVMe Now, NVDIMM Coming – WebFeet Research

How are high performance SSDs impacting the enterprise, client and commercial applications? Who is pushing the edge of SSD and controllers: intelligent processing of NVMe storage, compression and object storage?

As the SSD market enters 2017, the long-anticipated rollout of all-flash arrays featuring NVMe is finally finding traction at the high end of the enterprise market. Making the transition from SATA and SAS to PCIe and NVMe has been fraught with delays in standardizing the NVMe protocols and the development of an Ethernet- type fabric based on the NVMe protocol (NVMf). 

Overall, the SSD market has grown in all three markets: enterprise, client and commercial reaching a market volume of $41 billion by 2021. With the adoption of new interfaces like NVMe and the Memory Channel, and embracing emerging media like 3D NAND and Persistent Memory (ReRAM / XPoint) the industry is undergoing a transformation. The old computing storage model is unable to keep up with the amount of data needed to be stored. It needs to merge storage into memory in order to process in real time more complex data, diverse data types and much higher volume of data anticipated through 2021.

Even though NAND-flash based SSDs perform at several orders of magnitude higher than HDDs they suffer from the same non-deterministic inadequacies as compared to solutions based on XPoint memory. Flash memory based SSDs suffer the indeterminate delay inserted by the Flash Translation Layer in its production of the of physical block addresses. This is one reason that all-flash array architects like Pure Storage desire additional physical control at the Flash Translation Layer. Additional storage system functions such as deduplication, compression, error coding, power-on fill, data recovery ops, checkpointing, and scrubbing are further accelerated by this approach.

WebFeet Research, Inc., a non volatile memory and storage market research firm, released the twelfth annual report Solid State Drives Markets and Applications 2017 report, SS300SSD-2017. It concentrates on the enterprise market with the emergence of PCIe, NVMe (U.2 and M.2) and NVDIMM SSDs as well as quantifying the client and commercial markets. It addresses the difficulty of migrating from HDD to SSD and to hybrid and all-flash storage systems while advancing the ‘intelligent processing’ of memory and storage.