Enterprise SSDs to Replace HDDs at 10:1 Ratio in 2010, 2.5:1 in 2015

Research and Markets announced the addition of the Enterprise SSDs: Technologies & Markets report to their offering.

This report covers the market for flash-based solid-state drives (SSDs) in enterprise servers and SANs (storage area networks), focusing in particular on high-performance SSDs designed to meet the needs of the enterprise.

Through exhaustive research and a months-long series of interviews with participants in all sides of this new market Objective Analysis has developed models for acceptance in several key markets.

The market is forecast three ways: From the bottom up, analyzing the demand for enterprise SSDs from 22 end markets, from the top down, reviewing an enterprise HDD forecast and analyzing which parts of the market are threatened with replacement by SSDs, and finally a forecast by interface, which splits out the top-down forecast into markets for the three leading enterprise SSD interfaces.

Key findings are:

The market for enterprise SSDs will grow from 150,000 units in 2010 to over 4.1 million units in 2015, representing an average annual growth of nearly 90%.
Enterprise SSD revenues, which should reach $510 million in 2010, will grow at a 55% average annual rate $3.8 billion by 2015.
A significant portion of this growth will be driven by a steep price decline in the SSD market driven by NAND price declines, a move from SLC to MLC flash, and other important price declines driven by a maturing of SSD controller technology.
Enterprise HDDs are threatened by this new technology, which initially replaced enterprise HDDs at a 10:1 ratio, but this drops to 2.5:1 by the end of the forecast period. This means that the Enterprise HDD market will shrink faster than the enterprise SSD market can grow.
The enterprise SSD market which saw rapid adoption in transaction processing systems in recent past, is now experiencing even stronger growth in large Internet systems. This market will drive the majority of enterprise SSD growth in the longer term.
Significant resources are being committed to SSDs by a number of companies, but the technology is still in its infancy, and many pitfalls still need to be addressed. This report documents these pitfalls and the efforts being devoted to their solution.