Did you know that today, hard disk drives (HDDs) only account for 39.1% of the digital storage in the media and entertainment industry?
That’s according to Coughlin Associates 2011 Digital Storage for Media and Entertainment Report just released this past week. But, by 2016 Coughlin projects that HDDs will account for 60.1%, taking share away from largely tape (shrinks from 43.6& to 39.1) and optical (shrinks from 17.1% to .6%). The report also notes, that flash storage only grows .1% (not one percent, point one percent) from .2% to .3% largely for cameras and some content distribution servers.
So 60.1% is nice, but what’s even nicer is the increase in storage capacity shipments which is projected to grow to 62,736 PB (Petabytes) – that’s 62,736,000 TB (Terabytes)! Up from 11,248 PB this year (2011)….that’s 5.6X growth in 5 years.
Now the media and entertainment industry is just one sliver of the over storage market, all be it a large one driven by an on-going conversion of analog (film) to digital content, increased resolutions, (Smart HDTVs, 3D, etc), and increased distribution (Cloud, mobile, etc). And all this leads to increased demands on backing up and archiving which, according to the report, will account for 60% of the total capacity shipments.
What’s interesting is that what the media and entertainment industry is facing is not unlike what other industries are facing – like Healthcare. Transitioning from a largely analog business to digital, the use of higher resolution imagery equipment, and the infrastructure to share digital health records between patience, doctor, hospital, insureance, etc. It’s practically the same story no matter what industry you look at.
Need less to say, I am not shocked by this. All I know is it will be a long time before the headline reads “Flash takes over media and entertainment”…
Are you shocked?
Storage Newsletter has a nice rundown of the report…Check it out. Here’s a link to Coughlin Associates report brochure.
[…] Hard drives take over media and entertainment by 2016 says Coughlin […]
[…] One the most “entertaining” reports (if you can call research reports entertaining that is) is Coughlin Associates annual Digital Storage for Media and Entertainment. In fact, I blogged about the 2011 report here. […]