The digital transformation and the widespread adoption of new technologies have brought significant challenges to the information industry, particularly in the storage of vast amounts of unstructured data. At the 2021 Big Data Industry Summit, Jiang Chunyu, Deputy Director of the Big Data and Blockchain Department at the Cloud Computing and Big Data Research Institute of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, highlighted the critical role of data storage technology in the modern information industry. With the escalating demand for data storage, continuous advancements in media, architecture, protocols, applications, and operational models are imperative.
As we enter the era of the digital economy, data centers of all sizes have become essential infrastructure. The rise of new technologies and commercial applications is driving a massive demand for edge computing and data centers. According to the Internet Data Center (IDC), the global data volume is projected to reach 175 Zettabytes (ZB) by 2025, with a compound annual growth rate of 31.8% over five years. Data center storage will account for more than 70% of this data. In 2020, enterprise-level solid-state drives, a crucial storage medium for data centers, saw shipments of 35.6 million units with an average capacity of 2.7 Terabytes (TB), marking a nearly 30% increase in total shipment capacity compared to 2019.
Traditional storage applications, such as databases, files, and streaming media, are now overshadowed by large-scale data applications driven by cloud computing, big data, and artificial intelligence. These emerging applications expose the limitations of traditional storage in terms of performance, security, and reliability.
For instance, in autonomous driving, a single vehicle can generate tens of terabytes of data per day. Traditional storage methods, which rely on repeated erasing, lead to significant data loss and pose management challenges, making it difficult to create effective storage resource pools.
In contrast, "software-defined storage" (SDS) technology, originating from large Internet data centers, offers a scalable and flexible solution for the new infrastructure era. Xu Xin, CEO of Xingchen Tianhe, a data infrastructure technology platform provider, explains that SDS uses unified software to manage and control storage hardware, leveraging general-purpose hardware with software-defined functions and performance. This approach integrates large-scale Internet technology with modern enterprise storage functions, enabling the virtualization, abstraction, and automation of storage resources, resulting in flexible, elastic, and highly available storage systems.
Xingchen Tianhe's new enterprise-level SDS product exemplifies this innovation. With one storage operating system, two storage products, and one storage core technology, their solution supports diverse business scenarios, addressing data storage and management challenges across complex structures such as cloud and terminals. This helps government and enterprise organizations establish unified data management platforms for all protocols and scenarios, enhancing data integration and management. The digital transformation and upgrading costs for these organizations can be reduced by one third, while improving the overall performance of IT systems by over 50%.
The rapid adoption of new applications has introduced novel storage scenarios. Simultaneously, the mobile Internet's development has significantly altered enterprise system architectures, driving the rapid expansion of storage requirements. These factors collectively accelerate the growth of the SDS market.
Projections indicate that China's SDS market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 10.1% over the next five years, reaching a market capacity of nearly $2.46 billion by 2024. As the market scale forms, a core supplier system is emerging. IDC's market share rankings position Xingchen Tianhe, alongside Huawei, New H3C, and Sugon, in the leading echelon of core suppliers in China's SDS market.
Xu Xin notes that while China lagged about 20 years behind foreign companies in traditional storage infrastructure R&D, the country is now on a level playing field with global leaders in SDS technology and applications. Domestic SDS technology has gained considerable confidence, and through dual innovation in self-developed storage technology and digital subscription service models, it is empowering markets at all levels.