Summary: <br> Micron makes memory and storage.<br> <br> * total 110B market for memory<br> * total semiconductor market 385B<br> * memory is a substantial proportion of the whole market.<br> <br> Micron highlights two transitions from centralised storage to distributed storage, then placing the data at the edge of the network.<br> Interpretation <br> <br> * storage arrays are less important because they are smaller part of the mix<br> * edge storage is a new market for smaller, niche solution<br> <br> Public cloud storage spent $19.6B in 2018. growing at 12% CAGR<br> F500 moving to a combined in/off premise storage model — Some workloads and data will remain on premise<br> <br> Takeaway: There will be a dirty winner takes all battle for enterprise IT storage.<br> SSD are $7B market growing 31% CAGR<br> Flash is 50% is Enterprise SSD market<br> Public cloud is driving the technology in SSD, while the Enterprise is moving away from storage array to distributed storage engines.<br> Enterprise it storage will use technology that is led by public cloud companies driving their requirements with manufacturer<br> Micron is making a wider range of products.<br> Takeaway: whats striking here is the change in storage technology now that legacy storage vendors are no longer involved. When most storage came through EMC, it made sense to prevent innovation so they could sell old products at higher products. Make something once, sell it many times is a good business model that inherently prevents innovation.<br> Now that public cloud/hyperscalers are driving technology and spending money to buy the newer storage, this means that a wider range of different products is possible.<br> So we will see SATA SSD, NVMe SSD exist. Plus other 3D express, 3D NAND etc where before it was difficult to bring them to market via the storage vendors.<br> <br> Micron talks about improving the Linux software for flash. By improving the applications you can achieve order of magnitude improvements is flash. Working with database software to increase storage performance by 8 times. Also reducing Linux storage stack by 95% while reducing power consumption by up to 85%. I’d like to get more details how this is done to understand more about this but its<br> Takeaways: <br> Storage industry is growing in new ways. The need for more storage is only part of the story, the rise of hyperscalers are driving new technology which drive new products.<br> At the same time, there are moves to optimise the storage software drivers so further improve performance and power consumption. Again, driven by hyperscalers companies because enterprise it vendors never really cared about power or improving their products.<br> Enterprise IT is slow to implement change. In my view, legacy storage vendors are slow to adopt new technology because they have to spend money (they would call it investment) to make new products. It makes more sense for them to sell the old products and get sales people to convince customers that the old stuff is still worth buying.<br> So the public cloud gets better at a faster rate than enterprise it. Because they are willing to implement new technology while Enterprise IT isn’t.<br>
