& ldquo; High-end storage knowledge & rdquo; KOL watermelon, author of the public account and well-known in the storage circle, at the 2024 data infrastructure technology summit-& ldquo; Distributed storage technology and application Forum & rdquo; the development of distributed full Flash is comprehensively analyzed from the perspective of market and technology.
Through the interpretation of the relevant data stored by Chinese enterprises by consulting companies in 2023, we can help you understand the market driving force of distributed full Flash growth. In terms of technology, it introduces the new development of manufacturers' technologies and products represented by Shared-Everything architecture.
Brother watermelon pointed out that distributed all-flash has become a hot spot, which will lead the development of the domestic enterprise storage market. The price increase of SSD and some Xinchuang servers may affect the promotion of distributed all-flash. Flash memory utilization has become a key factor in the popularization of distributed all-flash. Distributed all-shared architecture has great advantages, but there are not many products available in the market at present. At the same time, the CheckPoint writing problem of AIGC and the fully shared architecture also need to be optimized. The performance of a single volume will become a competitive hot spot for various distributed flash memory products. The technologies related to the fully shared architecture are still being improved, it will promote the rapid development of distributed all-flash.
Looking back on the distributed all-flash market and technology in 2023, first of all, the overall trend of storage ESS in Chinese enterprises is declining. In fact, Chinese enterprise storage has been growing at a high speed for many years. Last year should be the first decline in this period of time. After the epidemic, we thought there was a good rebound, but it is still worse than we expected.
However, we also see some bright spots. For example, although traditional storage is declining, distributed storage and hyper-fusion remain growing. IDC predicts that it may exceed the share of traditional storage this year.
The total flash market in China accounts for 24%, which is almost 1/4. In fact, you may not be able to judge how this result is. The gap with foreign countries is narrowing, but it is still quite big. In my impression, the proportion of all flashes in American storage should be about half.
Quanshan is still growing in China, and the main driving forces may lie in Xinchuang and AI. The growth of all-flash mainly lies in the growth of the distributed Market. This is the first time that IDC has disclosed this share in its report. The original share of all-flash is not divided into distributed and centralized, it disclosed this share for the first time. In 2022, the proportion of distributed full flashover may be only 7%, which increased to 11.7% last year. In distributed storage, the proportion of full flashover is also increasing, of course, the growth rate is lower than that of centralized full flash. We can see that this is a state of rapid growth.
In distributed architecture storage, if it is full flash of software-defined storage, about 16.1% of it is sold in the form of full Flash, which I think is mainly driven by AI. AI storage requires full flash storage because it meets high performance to meet GPU requirements.
Second, we can see that the proportion of all-flash ultra-converged storage is very low, only 5.1%. In fact, we also see that all-flash storage is promoted in the market, including centralized storage and distributed storage, however, it seems that the hyperfusion of full Flash is relatively small, and the hyperfusion of only full Flash is not much. Full Flash Super Fusion, I imagine the demand is quite large, but in fact its proportion is lower than a certain storage, I don't think it should be so low.
In fact, the end-to-end NVMe is a mainstream in the market. In the IDC report, I see that 68.7% of the storage is multi-MME, but for many end-to-end NVMe storage, the disks they use are not NVMe disks, so it is actually a fake, saying that its storage supports NVMe, it may have compatibility, it can also be plugged into SATA SSD, therefore, in fact, it does not take advantage of the end-to-end NVMe, because the end-to-end NVMe includes disks that require NVMe. Not only the front end but also the back end may be the same.
Second, we can see that the progress of QLC in the world is very encouraging. However, in China, we also see China's data and global data. Indeed, I see the prediction of QLC, the share in 2027 is very large, more than 40% may be in QLC, but in fact we also see this situation in China, because it is mainly because of Xinchuang.
At present, there is no domestic QLC disk for mass production in the market. I haven't seen the enterprise-level QLC ecology in China yet. There is indeed a problem, that is, chicken first and egg first, because the disk is made, the manufacturer does not adapt it and cannot use it. As we all know, the life span of QLC is only a few hundred times. If the software is not well done, we dare not use QLC. The performance of random writing is relatively poor, moreover, the write life is relatively low, so the software must be optimized very well to solve this problem.
If there is no plate, then don't do it. If you don't do it, it may be difficult for manufacturers to sell it. Therefore, this is a stalemate stage, hoping to break the balance point. Foreign countries have already succeeded, because foreign countries pursue power consumption. Although it sells more expensive than QLC, why do users buy it? Because of its high density of single disk, therefore, the overall TCO can be improved, which is its value.
In terms of market price, the price of flash disk has risen sharply. Compared with the lowest point in the same period last year, the price of that disk I buy now is basically more than twice the price. For the sake of Xinchuang and AIGC, it may be a rigid need. All Flash is so expensive in the market. If we make a prediction based on last year's price, all flash may not be able to buy it, so this is a problem that everyone should consider.
Some manufacturers start to promote EC, compression and so on now. They cannot completely pursue performance. They should consider it evenly and pursue the effective ratio of flash memory. Moreover, it is estimated that the flash memory will still rise in price in the future. The adjustment of the production line is not as fast as that of our consumer goods. The adjustment of its production line will be stopped and then it will be produced again on a new production line. The cycle is half a year, the market response is at least half a year behind.
Look at the technical problems. Last year, I focused on some architectural transformations. Last year, I talked about pure engineering architecture. Now I'm talking about the progress of some manufacturers that support pure engineering architecture, let's see if they have a better idea for the current AIGC era, or if they have a better idea for the current market situation.
VAST DATA is the industry's first unstructured storage with distributed storage architecture. Because it does not support blocks at present, it said at the end of last year that it might launch the block function this year, at present, it has not been seen yet, so it is more positioned as a file and object, unstructured. At present, its products are developing well and selling well. Now the valuation is nearly 10 billion US dollars. The biggest selling point it gives us is not its architecture, because ordinary users don't care what architecture he uses, but what he gives us is that it is cheap, because he told me that its cost can be low for hard disks, which is its biggest selling point. Of course, it requires certain performance and fixed capacity, it is also an advantage in large-scale cases.
The second is that we see that the market is changing too fast. The industry may know the price of flash memory now, especially the price of Haiguang servers, which is rising sharply here, therefore, all these will affect the promotion of online storage, especially the promotion of full flash. It is a matter of cost for you to use more server nodes and more disks. Therefore, in fact, many people begin to pay attention to the efficiency of all-flash. The usage rate of flash memory will be crucial in these two years. Therefore, if many manufacturers do not support EC yet, they may do it as soon as possible, with only three copies, I personally feel that it may become more and more difficult to sell.
Although some manufacturers have launched a full-control architecture product, we now see that this architecture may have some benefits. There are not many products available online, there is no trend yet, and there is still a big trend, but this is also the current situation of new technology development, because a new architecture will have a long product cycle, it also needs the market to digest, which is a current situation. But I believe its price advantage still exists, and it may have more advantages in the future.
Therefore, we can see that the entire architecture and technology are also developing continuously. There are not many products in the market, but they are also evolving iteratively. At present, the progress is also quite fast, so we hope to give them some more time to see if there will be more products coming out. Seeing such products coming out will be more suitable for our national conditions, to help us quickly iterate and keep up with the development of the world.
(For more information, see post-conference topics)
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on August 28th, the 2024 global Flash Summit will be held grandly in Nanjing. Six thematic forums will be presented throughout the day, bringing together nearly 100 experts from industry, university and research institutes to communicate with you on the spot to interpret new Flash technologies and new trends of enterprise-level applications, release the Flash industry database and Panorama, flash cloud list, a overview of the development history of flash memory, more exciting content, please look forward to it!
This article is reprinted from: DOIT media
