Ubiquitous Storage at SV2016

January 2016 – At Storage Visions 2016, a panel of VCs, analysts and the CTA discussed the directions and drivers for ubiquitous storage and persistent memories. SASI presented the consolidation and growth in the storage marketplace. New technologies are moving to the implementation stage with a venture round investments totaling $1.4B in 45 rounds in 2015, down from $2.3B in 42 rounds in 2014. However on the established side, M&A totaled $97.4B in 29 deals up from $3.2B in 2014 and $9.5B in 2013. The big transactions driving this market were Dell/EMC, WD/Sandisk, Microsemi/PMC-Sierra and Carlyle Group/Symantec covering $92.6B of the transactions. These deals, will drive a primarily flat market for 2016.

For new market drivers are being based on both professional and consumer adoption / acceptance of (1) VR/AR; (2) Immersive computing; (3) 3D and the 360Camera market; (4) Smart Home and (5) smartphone content. These markets are based on the presumption that this consumer and independently created content, mostly derived from the social media marketplace, will replace the distribution model for professionally created content for advertising, cinema, TV, gaming and music. The immersive computing model is leveraging the Intel/Microsoft platform behind the RealSense 360 imaging system and is focusing on advanced processing in the cloud.

As sensors and image processing grows on a M2M basis, the amount of data grows. Examples of the data flow include the Nest Ecosystem that can handle up to 10 cameras in the home. Each HD camera can consume 380 Gb of uploaded content per month. With 10 cameras, that is 3.8 Tb per month of storage that is needed. The cameras can consume over 1Mbps each. This results in a 10 camera household needed bandwidth beyond the sub 3Mbps Upload that is the US average for broadband.