Market Trends of Asia-Pacific Data Center Storage Industry
IT and Telecom to Hold Significant Share
- The rollout of 5G networks is expected to strengthen the digital economy and increase demand for high data center storage infrastructure. The arrival of 5G is expected to bring a major increase in speeds, low latencies, and an unforeseen level of network capabilities.
- In Asia-Pacific, the hyper-connectivity environment has reinforced the importance of telcos, which play a foundational role in supporting consumers’ and enterprises’ connectivity and collaboration needs. Across Asia-Pacific, 75% of the operators registered positive revenue growth. South Korea is second only to Hong Kong in the world rankings of telecom market maturity.
- South Korea is also on the leading edge of the latest telecom technology developments, including around 6G. In November 2022, Malaysian telcos Celcom and DiGi approved the merger agreement. Once the two companies are fully merged, the new entity will be one of the largest carriers in Malaysia, with over 20 million subscribers.
- The advent of 5G in Asia-Pacific accelerated small-cell deployment for high-speed network connectivity. Many nations have created exemption standards that can be applied when deploying new small cells. Some of the most energy-intensive data centers are server farms facilitating communication between users and web services. In APAC, most storage servers now use solid-state drives (SSDs), which use flash storage to handle high-throughput data requests at high speeds.
- 5G is close to seven times better in terms of throughput compared to 4G, at 10 Gbs compared to 1.45 Gbs. With NVMe or SSD over HDD, such enterprise-level technology allows significant I/O throughput. The demand for NVMe is increasing in SSD servers and storage appliances which is expected to drive the market during the forecast period.
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China to Witness Significant Growth
- In recent years, China has focused much attention on its data center sector. This has given rise to a data center ecosystem that is both economically impactful and technologically advanced. Users opt for cloud services due to increased scalability, wherein they can increase the number of network storage based on the business requirement. For instance, during festivals such as China Singles Day, the attractive offers listed by the websites entice huge amounts of website traffic and financial transactions, which are easily managed, and the cloud infrastructure ensures performance.
- Cloud computing provides web-based infrastructure, wherein services such as additional computing and information storage are delivered to the clients. The cloud infrastructure is comparatively cheaper than the traditional system, wherein sizeable server farms and storage systems are allocated in a data center.
- A bank's data center is its lifeline. It is a key infrastructure for carrying financial services. It includes the core and front-end systems, keeping payments, card exchanges, mobile banking, e-banking, counter services, and the credit card system. Financial institutions prefer flash disks to undertake informatization.
- Recently, China CITIC Bank (CCB) replaced its traditional storage with Huawei’s high-end OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage system, marking the beginning of CCB’s journey to building an advanced digital commercial bank.
- Many businesses are constantly investing in data center expansion, which is expected to create market opportunities for flash memory devices used in data center applications. GLP Pte, for example, raised USD 500 million in new funds in February 2022 to help expand its data center platform in China amid rising investor demand for digital infrastructure assets. According to the company, the transaction could value China data centers between USD 4 billion and USD 5 billion. Such investments are projected to propel the market forward.
- Furthermore, China Mobile announced in December 2022 that it is increasing its investments in data centers after gaining over 1,000 partners. It has also worked with the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Computing Technology and Peng Cheng Laboratory in Shenzhen to build data center infrastructure. Such investments are anticipated to propel the nation's data center infrastructure activities, necessitating the installation of storage-based devices.
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