Market Consolidation and High Demand for Flash in 2009

John Tu, President and co-founder of Kingston Technology Company, Inc., discusses the company’s predictions for developments in the memory market in 2009 and the trends that are likely to emerge.

Consolidation and a simpler market – “As the impact of the economic downturn starts to hit home, it is likely that some of the smaller players in the memory market will have increasing difficulties and may not survive. Too many companies producing memory chips have caused prices to fall over the last months and consolidation should help the industry correct itself. In this environment, Kingston Technology is well positioned to weather the current global economic crisis thanks to strong finances and solid cash reserves”.

The rise of DRAM – “DDR3 memory is set to gain more ground during 2009. This will be boosted by the introduction and adoption of triple-channel and possibly quad-channel memory technologies. We can also expect to see that VLP (Very Low Profile) memory modules will increase in usage, allowing us to consume less raw materials for existing and new modules. We are also seeing an increased demand for higher speed memory products by prosumers, who need higher performances in applications like video/audio content creation to improve application speeds”.

High demand for Flash – “2009 is likely to see increased demand for high capacity, high performance SD cards (SDHC) as users adopt High Definition based video and photographic devices. SDHC currently has a capacity ceiling of 32GB but this format may change during 2009 to enable the production of higher capacities”.

Keep your data safe in 2009 – “2008 has highlighted the need to ensure that data in the public and private sectors remains safe. The rise in the number of high profile data loss scandals has shown that data is at risk when the proper procedures are not in place and the right technology is not used to ensure that data isn’t so vulnerable. The next year will see the demand for hardware encrypted USB flash drives to increase as well as the capacities that are on offer”.

Virtualisation, over the Hype Cycle – “Virtualisation will continue to be a hot topic and something that will be top of the IT manager’s agenda. According to Gartner, virtualisation is now over the Hype Cycle and we are likely to see companies realise the benefits of having it as part of their IT infrastructure. With regards to memory, IT managers are likely to start looking at ways to get increased ROI and improved TCO from their virtualisation projects. This is likely to come from increasing the memory capacity for virtual servers. Higher memory capacity also enables improved virtual machine performance and scalability”.

SSD still a hot topic but not a mainstream technology – “Solid State Drives (SSDs) will continue to be something that vendors talk about and invest in R&D, but I don’t think that we will see them becoming a fully mainstream technology in 2009. They will still be too expensive as Flash based SSDs are considerably more costly when compared to HDDs (Price per GB is the typical formula comparison). However, an increasingly over-supplied NAND market, over the next year or so, could lead to accelerated price erosion, making SSD products more accessible”.

New industry standards for SSD – “2008 saw a number of reported reliability issues with new uses of SSDs. These were largely due to conventional early-design growing pains. Refinements have been made and SSD products from tier one makers are now market worthy. Nonetheless, as SSDs gain traction in the market it is likely that we will see a level of new industry standards to ensure the high performance and high quality of this technology”.

Green IT – do people still care? – “I think that in 2009 Green IT will still be a hot topic but not because it is green but more because of the cost savings associated with green IT. Spiralling energy costs are impacting on everyone so if companies can use lower energy IT equipment it won’t be solely for ecological reasons but because it is good for the bottom line”.