Data traffic handled by data centers is forecast to grow an average of 125% per year until 2017, when it hits 7.7 Zb, according to figures from Cisco.
Demand for shortage in data centers is expected to rise 47% per year over that period, said Jung-Bai Lee, Samsung’s VP of product planning and application engineering, at the company’s investors forum on Monday.
Meanwhile, he said data center revenue is on track to grow 36% annually over the next three years to $19.5 billion by the end of 2016.
Lee said there is a wide gap between data center traffic growth (estimated at 3.7X between 2011 and 2016) and the projected investment in data center infrastructure. Data center space (square feet) is forecast to expand just 1.7 times while spending on servers and storage is expected to increase by 1.2 times during the period.
“There is not enough physical space and storage for data centers. The investment is not keeping up.”
Lee noted that one of the top concerns for companies running and using data center is the high cost of power, which accounts for almost one-third of the total operating cost of DCs. And the power consumption of memory devices in DCs represents 32% of the total power consumed.
Lee stated that the company’s fifth-generation DDR4 DRAM boosts performance 39% over its fourth-generation technology and reduces power memory usage 15% (and overall system power by 6%).
Its NVMe PCIe SSD memory, he said, uses three times less power than SATA HDD technology while improving performance by 700 times. The new SSD consumes just 2 watts and has an output of 140,000 IOPS.
The memory devices, by improving performance while decreasing the power and space requirements, can sharply reduce the total cost of ownership of data centers. Lee said the potential TCO savings effectively translate into space and server/storage spending improvements of 3.4X and 2X respectively – which more than close the gap between forecasted traffic growth and the required infrastructure investments.
He claims that its fifth-generation green memory solutions can to lead to 45TWh in energy savings, which comes to about $3.1 billion.
When asked if Samsung was considering moving downstream to make servers and storage devices, he said “not yet. Our focus is on memory and we will continue to collaborate with our partners.”