HDD shipments for enterprise applications are projected to increase from 40.5 million units in 2009 to 52.6 million units in 2014, according to new research from research and advisory firm IDC.
In addition, the research firm expects the HDD industry to ship more that petabytes for enterprise applications in the next two years than it did in the preceding 20 years.
The HDD industry will deliver more than 300,000 petabytes of storage capacity over the next five years to enterprise datacentres and clouds, the research firm said.
IDC said that HDD vendors forged ahead by introducing new HDD products/form factors that address both current and future enterprise storage market requirements, despite an unprecedented decline in hard disk drive (HDD) terabyte shipments for enterprise applications in 2009.
The research firm expects various ongoing trends to continue to impact enterprise HDD market revenue over the forecast period, including a continued shift away from higher cost performance-optimised HDDs to lower cost capacity-optimised offerings and solid state drives (SSDs). HDD revenue derived from enterprise markets is expected to grow at 1.7% CAGR during this time.
According to the research, the transition from 3.5in. to 2.5in. performance-optimised form factor HDDs will be complete by 2012. The price per gigabyte of performance-optimised HDD storage will continue to decline at a rate of approximately 25% to 30% per year.
John Rydning, research director for storage mechanisms: disk at IDC, said: We’re definitely seeing intensive cost cutting measures among end users striving to bring more efficiency to current solutions. The employment of technologies such as data deduplication, thin provisioning, storage multitiering, and storage virtualisation are all contributing to reducing end-user costs.
