In 2018, will China's storage industry still be controlled by others?

Source: The content comes from "China Report Network", thank you.

1. Development History of the Storage Industry

The development history of the storage industry is the evolution of technology and demand promoting each other. In order to meet the different application needs of users, four major categories of products were born. From the dimensions of general products and application products, the four-quadrant diagram of historical, current and future storage products is drawn as follows:

Chart: Storage products plotted in four quadrants

Disk arrays are the main form of general-purpose storage. They have evolved through direct-attached storage (DAS), dual-controller disk arrays, multi-controller disk arrays, and horizontally expanded multi-controller disk arrays. At the same time, based on different business performance requirements, different storage media are used, and hybrid arrays and all-flash arrays are gradually subdivided.

Network attached storage (NAS) originated from file servers. It is essentially a file system and belongs to application-based storage. It is combined with different hardware in different application scenarios to become a storage product. Due to the widespread use of files in storage, NAS has gradually evolved from a dedicated system to a more general integrated NAS, that is, SAN/NAS integration. When facing massive file applications, it has a tendency to develop into a dedicated distributed or clustered NAS in the future.

Server storage with built-in hard disks is application-based storage. From the initial application server supporting storage to software-defined storage (SDS) and then to hyper-converged architecture (HCI), it is increasingly showing the characteristics of solutions for specific applications.

Object storage is an application-based storage that originated from content addressing technology at the beginning of this century. It was initially dominated by a few large manufacturers such as EMC and Amazon, and now more and more open source products have been developed, such as CEPH. In the public cloud field, it is generally developed by Internet companies according to their own needs. In the private cloud field, object storage is currently generally used for archiving and preserving massive documents, thereby replacing traditional tape libraries or optical disk libraries. It has not yet formed an industry scale and leading brand. With the development of the big data analysis industry, it is expected that a market of a certain scale may be formed in the future.

2. Storage Industry Chain

Where there is data, there is storage. The industrial chain of the "big storage" industry can be roughly divided into three levels: storage chips/components/core software, storage machines and solutions, and system integration and storage services. The upstream includes three categories: general chips/components (such as CPU, memory, connectors, etc.), storage-specific chips/components (such as HDD, SSD, SAS chips, etc.), and storage core software; the midstream is mainly storage machines and solutions, including enterprise-level storage (such as SAN, NAS, multi-protocol, etc.) and consumer-level storage (such as mobile hard disks, flash drives, etc.); the downstream is mainly system integration and storage services, that is, integrating storage products with other products and providing them to end users in the form of a whole system or service.

Chart: Storage Industry Chain

Source: Guanyan Tianxia

1. Upstream: storage chips/components/core software

The upstream of the storage industry is mainly the semiconductor manufacturing industry, storage medium manufacturing industry, data transmission equipment manufacturing industry and core software development industry. The products produced by upstream manufacturers are like basic components like "rebar" and "cement". The development of upstream industries has an important impact on the cost and technology of this industry. On the one hand, the replacement of core components such as chips, memory, hard disks and other products will directly change the hardware structure of storage products and promote the innovation and upgrading of the entire product. On the other hand, the supply and demand changes and price fluctuations of major raw materials will affect the production cost of this industry. Core software development is also very important. Only with core software development capabilities can it be possible to reasonably use various raw materials to form high-quality storage products. The stronger the software capabilities, the stronger the control and use of hardware. On the whole, after years of development, the upstream storage-related hardware industry has a high degree of technical maturity, a stable market structure, and sufficient price competition. Overall, it is conducive to the stable development of the storage industry.

2. Midstream: storage equipment and solutions

The storage system and solutions in the midstream generally refer to the use of upstream chips/components and core software to assemble a storage system with data storage functions, that is, using "rebar" and "cement" to build a house. Based on the usage scenario, it can be divided into consumer-level/personal storage and enterprise-level/data center storage.

Consumer/personal storage covers not only personal storage devices, but also PCs, tablets, smartphones, and smart terminal devices that may explode in the future. DRAM, NAND Flash, hard disks and other memories are widely used in these devices and are an important part of data storage.

Enterprise-level/data center storage is mainly used in the construction of IT systems and data centers of governments, enterprises and institutions. Since the core software and hardware in the upstream storage industry have high technical barriers, midstream manufacturers generally adopt two competitive strategies: one is to purchase controllers, RAID cards, hard disks, core software, etc. produced by upstream manufacturers for assembly, or even directly purchase complete machines for OEM sales; the other is to connect the upstream and midstream, independently develop and design core software, controllers, interface components, etc., and then assemble them with other common components of upstream manufacturers (such as hard disks, fans, power supplies, etc.) to form complete machine products, such as Huawei and Macrosan.

3. Downstream: system integration and storage services

Since the IT needs of end users in the storage industry often include comprehensive computing, networking, and storage, but usually manufacturers in the industry focus on the storage field and have relatively limited system integration capabilities, they need to rely on professional system integrators to complete the provision of terminal products.

With the rapid development of cloud computing and big data in recent years, cloud storage service providers have gradually emerged in the downstream. Cloud storage is an extension of the concept of cloud computing. Cloud storage service providers no longer sell hardware. Through clusters or distributed file systems, different types of storage devices connected to the network work together to provide data storage and business access functions to individuals or enterprises. Users only need to purchase related services according to actual capacity and performance needs, that is, rent out the ready-made "house" and collect "rent". At present, cloud computing companies on the market basically provide cloud storage services, such as cloud computing giants such as Google, AWS, Microsoft, Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, Baidu Cloud, and Qiniu Cloud and LeTV Cloud, which focus on niche areas. Cloud storage service providers provide different levels of cloud storage services based on differentiated business categories and data value. At present, the cloud storage services of public clouds are mainly aimed at individual users and the backup of non-important data of enterprise users. The high-performance, high-reliability and high-security storage services for enterprise users are still in the early exploration stage. It is expected that there will be great room for cooperation with midstream manufacturers in the future.

The end users of the storage industry are widely distributed in all walks of life that have demand for data storage, covering most areas of the national economy. The market size and development potential are huge, and the overall market demand will not be greatly affected by abnormal fluctuations in individual industries.

Today is the 1511th content shared by "Semiconductor Industry Observer" for you, welcome to follow.

Follow the WeChat public account Semiconductor Industry Observation , reply to the keyword in the background to get more content

Reply Popular Science , read more popular science articles about the semiconductor industry

Reply Bitcoin , read more articles related to Bitcoin and mining machines

Reply Wafer , read articles related to wafer manufacturing

Reply Ziguang , read more articles related to Ziguang Company

Reply to ISSCC , see "The Trend of Semiconductor Industry from ISSCC Papers"

Reply BOE , read more articles related to BOE

Reply Storage , see more articles related to storage technology

Reply to A shares to see more articles related to listed companies

Reply Exhibition , see "2017 Latest Semiconductor Exhibition and Conference Calendar"

Reply Submit your article and read "How to become a member of "Semiconductor Industry Observer""

Reply Search and you can easily find other articles that interest you!

Click to read the original text and join the Moore Elite