The last time you may have heard of the word “storage” was probably a smartphone launch event where the presenter may have emphasized the need for a faster storage solution for “notched experience”. As we move towards a more digital world where things are supposed to be faster than usual, storage solutions in various industries will play an important role in keeping the technological revolution going. We spoke to Jaganathan Chelliah, Marketing Director of Western Digital India, about how storage solutions have changed over the years, adoption and trends in India, the future of storage technology, and how the company is leveraging areas like connected cars. Surveillance, next generation games to stay ahead of the curve.
Change trends
The biggest change in India is in the ever evolving data storage landscape. From using storage solutions such as hard drives (HDDs) to compact SSDs and cloud storage, customers and companies have started developing new solutions to meet their growing needs.
“Every technical transition is a search for higher performance and better experience. Consumers are clearly looking to make their PCs more productive, and the most important device that can significantly boost performance is an internal SSD. In addition, gaming has become a mainstream application and SSD based gaming PCs are the right experience, ”said Chelliah Gadgets 360.
Western Digital sells WD BLACK SSDs for games
The executive stressed that this is due to the fact that people are looking for greater productivity. Today, most laptops valued at Rs 40,000 and above have switched to internal SSDs. Most companies have also standardized SSDs (instead of HDDs) for desktops (56 percent) and laptops (68 percent), according to a report by Spiceworks. It is said that the growth in SSD adoption will continue into the future.
Similarly, Chelliah mentions that Western Digital is starting to see this trend in the portable storage category as well, and the company is targeting content creation on the go. While speaking on price sensitive markets like India and willingness to make that transition, the executive says both technologies will coexist.
“Those who want faster performance will switch to SSDs, and those who want better value for money and an affordable storage solution will go for high capacity HDDs,” said Chelliah. He also pointed out that WD has a strong portfolio for different customer segments – WD BLACK SSDs for gaming, WD Blue for content creation and productivity applications, and WD Green for everyday computing.
NVMe Technology: The Future?
NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) is the latest technology in storage driving digital transformation for many businesses and individuals. For the layman, a storage device with NVMe technology offers faster read and write speeds than one with an older one. NVMe SSDs attach to the PCI Express bus, and a PCIe Gen 3.0 connection is said to provide a transfer speed that is more than twice that of the SATA interface.
“Until recently, SSDs used SATA technology for data transfer, which was originally developed for hard drives. NVMe technology uses the PCIe interface and offers SSDs a significant increase in performance. This enables consumers to experience superior performance on their PCs. If you see, more and more PCs are being equipped with NVMe slots today, so the change is gradually being reflected and consumers are starting to see the true potential of NVMe technology, ”said Chelliah.
WD_BLACK NVMe-enabled SSDs offer ultra-fast transfer speeds, says Chelliah
One such area that accelerates storage solutions is gaming. According to a report, Covid-19 has caused the global video game to boom and the market is valued at $ 170 billion (around rupees 1.25,000) by the end of 2020. WD said it saw the trend and is doing solutions like WD_BLACK NVMe-enabled SSDs that offer ultra-fast transfer speeds. According to a Gartner report, novel flash solutions like NVMe would drive adoption in the near future.
“The gaming segment has grown tremendously in the last six months, from PC gaming to console gaming. We saw massive adoption as gamers gained their experience with the right gadgets and solutions. In fact, the main growth driver for PCs and smartphones in India over the past few quarters has been gaming. Regardless of whether they play games in the cloud or not, they need fast systems to get a complete experience, and storage is a key component of a system’s speed, ”said the managing director.
monitoring
In view of the increasing global security requirements, video surveillance is expected to increase steadily. WD estimates that the global video surveillance market is projected to reach over $ 62 billion in revenue by 2023 (approximately Rs 45.755 billion). Surveillance as a use case is actually booming in India, according to Chelliah.
“We are seeing a significant transition from a pure recording solution for post-event analysis to an AI-led intelligent video analysis and management solution. Nowadays, intelligent video solutions are used for a range of applications, from managing smart cities, to business analysis in logistics and warehousing, to maintaining a healthy and safe workplace for companies and protecting private and private customers. The advent of high resolution cameras with AI capabilities has created a strong need for high capacity storage that can hold multiple streams of AI content, ”Chelliah said.
WD Blue is intended for content creation and productivity applications
Autonomous vehicles and connected cars
Self-driving cars have come a long way, they are not just a concept and with the boom of 5G it has become easier for the automotive and transportation industries to quickly analyze data for a safe experience. This means that data in such ecosystems will be oil. It is reported that new autonomous cars generate and consume 0.75 GB of data per second.
As more data is generated by autonomous vehicles to support systems such as telematics, speech recognition, augmented reality, vehicle-to-vehicle communication (V2V) and more, storage systems need to capture, store, access and transform data. Storage is also needed to support the computing infrastructures that combine cloud services with in-car computing to handle the vast amounts of data collected from connected cars.
“Autonomous vehicles are the new data center on wheels that meets a new generation of storage infrastructure requirements. With new applications built into cars like dash cameras and autonomous computers, more data needs to be stored and processed than ever before. Our estimates assume that a single autonomous car is expected to have up to 1 TB of storage space by 2022. Without a doubt, the future of connected and autonomous cars is all about data, ”added Chelliah. Connected car penetration is expected to reach 24.4 percent in 2022, according to WD.
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