As businesses and consumers adapt to new and intelligent devices designed to deal with the massive explosion of data, developments in the solid state drive (SSD) and increasing adoption of cloud computing are set to be the key issues for 2011.
This is the prediction of John Tu, president and co-founder of Kingston Technology, who believes that whatever CIOs are planning, they must ensure that they have investigated the impact that Nand/Flash-based technology solutions can have on guaranteeing the success of their strategy.
According to Tu, in 2010 SSD technology was at the tipping point, where wider adoption driven by the need for better performing client devices resulted in a rapid reduction in the cost per gigabyte.
“We expect this trend to continue in 2011, as enterprises adopt SSDs to upgrade the performance of client devices and look to 'sweat their assets' for longer. Businesses will not only reap an immediate ROI but they will also see increased performance of their employees,” he says.
With the ever-increasing volume of data, we expect to see SSD become the prominent form of internal client storage within the next five years, particularly in business, Tu predicts.
“That said, we also expect SSD and HDD to co-exist for some time to come on the consumer computing platform (where migration to the cloud, for example, may take longer), with SSD driving the performance of boot, OS and high usage applications, and HDD continuing to store data,” he explains.
SSD evolution
Tu adds that in 2011, as SATA 3.0 becomes more common, SSD technology will evolve to change the way computer systems are designed forever, particularly in the industrial and embedded environments.
“The integration of new SSD form factors into computerised devices will enable industries such as automotive and manufacturing; and applications such as ATMs and CCTVs to benefit from increased performance, reduced failure rates over HDDs and added endurance to extend the lifecycle of the system.”
In regards to virtualisation, the Kingston Technology president notes that there has been a great deal of discussion about cloud computing for the past few years, and although expectations were running high, the hype has not lived up to the noise yet.
He points out that, despite developments in SAP software-as-a-service adoption and more applications on the market, constraints such as data centre bandwidth and data security still need further development before mass adoption is noted.
“In 2011, we will see a greater need for more virtualisation as the corporate market continues to see the benefits of 'doing more with less' by building out virtual server environments. As virtualisation continues to increase, core components like processing and memory will be on the agenda as businesses look to create efficient ways to deal with the ever-increasing amounts of data,” he points out.
USB viability
Concerning the technology leap of USB 3.0, Tu says the technology, with 10 times faster theoretical transfer speed to USB 2.0, means that USB has now become a viable external storage device.
“For example, someone buying a 64GB USB drive or higher, will not be looking to only copy a couple of pictures. Instead, they will be looking to back up hard-disks, copy entire music and movie libraries and thousands of pictures.
“There will be a flood of motherboards offering USB 3.0 as a standard in 2011, thus further driving adoption of USB 3.0 drives as the product of choice for personal mobile storage and large capacity backup,” says Tu.
He also attributes the growth of the mobile tablet market to the release of the iPad and other similar tablet devices.
He believes these 'intelligent devices' are designed to create a new experience in the way people interact with content, giving them access anytime, anywhere.
However, he points out, one limitation of the currently available tablets is their rather small in-built storage.
“This will lead to opportunities in 2011, where Flash-based products have a huge potential to be used as added, external storage for these gadgets. Consumers will be looking closely at what kind of external storage offerings can be used in combination with their tablet that will satisfy their needs, especially with fast transfer rates and additional security features being at the top of the list.”
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