Toshiba delivered a keynote speech on the strategies for its storage device business at Diskcon Japan 2011.
Diskcon Japan 2011 is a trade show that is taking place from Aug 2 to 3, 2011, in Tokyo. It was organized by IDEMA Japan. The speech was delivered by Hironobu Nishikori, executive managing director of Toshiba Corp and vice president of Toshiba's Semiconductor & Storage Products Company.
In the Tohoku Earthquake, many hard disk drives (HDDs) were broken, and important data were lost. However, data stored on cloud servers were not lost. Citing this case, Nishikori said, "The importance of data centers has been increasing more and more since the earthquake."
The amount of digital data generated in the world is expected to grow from the current 1.2 zettabytes (Zbytes) to 35 Zbytes in 2020. However, it is not that all the data will be permanently stored. Though the storage systems at data centers temporarily store an enormous amount of data, but, then, they are analyzed and data of low importance are deleted.
In this case, to temporarily store the enormous amount of data, high-capacity HDDs are used. On the other hand, data that are frequently accessed and require high access speeds are stored on SSDs (NAND flash memories). However, the storage capacities of SSDs are lower than those of HDDs. Therefore, among the data stored in SSDs, less-accessed data need to be gradually transferred to HDDs.
Nishikori said, "Such an optimization of data placement is what we are struggling with most now." Especially, it is now a great challenge to realize a high storage capability while considering security and power saving issues.
"(In optimizing such storage systems,) it is a great advantage to have both HDD and NAND flash memory businesses," he said.
It is because, by using technical know-how that is about NAND flash memories and can be accumulated only by those who manufacture NAND flash memories in their companies, it might become possible to provide storage solutions with high performance, low power consumption and high security that cannot be imitated by others.
In April 2011, Seagate Technology LLC, Toshiba's competitor, announced that it would purchase the HDD unit of Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, which has the largest share of the NAND flash memory market. So, it seems as if Seagate obtained both HDDs and NAND flash memories.
Commenting on this, Nishikori said, "Seagate Technology might be able to purchase NAND flash memories from Samsung Electronics at low costs. But Seagate will not be able to access the black box of NAND flash memory technologies. From that point of view, we can differentiate our products."