Toshiba set to emerge a major winner as data explodes

Where the colossal amount of data our digital lives continue to accumulate resides is of little interest for the majority of IT users.

Not so for Toshiba, one of the biggest storage brands in the world, and for whom the state of the global storage market matters a great deal. Toshiba’s storage portfolio runs the whole gamut, putting the company in an elevated position to leverage continuous developments in storage from large data farms to personal storage, and everything in between.

With end-to-end solutions, Toshiba can address all the major market segments, observes Santosh Varghese, general manager, Middle East and Africa, digital products and services, Toshiba Gulf FZE.

On the client side, Toshiba offers bare hard disk drives for the SMB market such as white label PCs manufacturers with the brand’ 2.5 and 3.5 inch drives.

Toshiba has time-honored legacy in the enterprise hard disk space as well as nearline drives designed for mission critical applications, says Varghese. Nearline drives are getting very popular especially for large data centers and cloud applications, Varghese adds. “Mission critical applications require mission critical drives.”

However, Solid State Drives (SSDs) are the future of storage technology, even in the enterprise, due to their inherently faster read/write speeds, less weight and lower power consumption, says Varghese. Toshiba offers a range of enterprise SSDs, increasingly popular in server farms.

The company’s SSDs range extends to clients and is a major OEM supplier for leading PC brands.

Memory

Toshiba pioneered NAND technology in the 90s. NAND flash memory is now exploding with the explosion of mobile data, Varghese observes. USB drives, another type of flash storage is still a growth area. This technology has now evolved to USB3.0, an even faster flash storage technology.

Recently, Toshiba launched a storage backup cum charging device for consumers. Research has shown that only 20% of mobile users back up their personal data with the risk of losing their precious personal information if something happens to their phone, Varghese observes. Canvio for Smartphone backs up personal data and charges the smartphone in one single user operation.

Toshiba recently made headlines with the announcement of 3D NAND flash chips, a technology which stacks 64 layers of flash cells and has 65% greater capacity than the previous generation technology, which used 48 layers.

Toshiba continues to innovate as demand continues to expand, driven by smartphones and IoT, says Santosh. By 2020, 44 Zettabytes of data will have to be stored, he observes. “There are only three major brands in the market today in this space and Toshiba is one of them.”

Much of the industry action will be on SSDs. Though the price for SSDs is still high compared to hard drives because, prices are expected to fall as demand picks up. “By the second half of 2018 we should see prices start to drop by around 15%,” says Santosh, adding, “By 2020, SSDs prices will most likely be at par with hard disks as demand-driven economies of scale level the playing field”

Within five years, SSDs will be the default storage medium, Santosh asserts. In developed markets, SSDs are already penetrating the enterprise, a trend that will soon catch up in the Middle East.