Micron recently presented their Winter Analysts meeting and offered a review of the industry and some hints on the direction on where things are going. A few highlight from the slides include that the supply growth for both DRAM memory and NAND. The reasons for this can be found on slides 41 and 49 where future products are discussed, including 3D memory cubes and a mystery “new generation” of memory.

I read an article that Paul Shread wrote a few months ago on Nantero, which designs carbon nanotube memory. There is a huge need (slide 54) for low power non-volatile memory for both mobile devices and for larger memories near the processor, which are needed for things like data analysis and table space.

Another interesting slide is 56, which looks at the growth and bandwidth needs of the graphics memory market, which really surprised me. Slides 60 through 66 focus on the NAND storage market and Micron’s product offerings. Micron has a wide product line that includes everything from PC storage to enterprise SAS storage, but looking at the web site I cannot get many details as I am not a reseller. I did get one brochure for the P410m and it did not seem to support the ANSI T10 data protection model.

So what does this all mean for our future in the data storage industry? I think Micron and likely other companies are going to making some major changes from 2015 to the end of the decade in the area of non-volatile memory as the market demands changes for mobile devices that need both low power usage and non-volatile memory. The number of mobile devices around the world is in the billions and it’s growing faster than any type of device, therefore the first vendor to market with something that changes the game will win. Read the Micron PDF and see if you see what I see.

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