Storage capacity requirement are growing rapidly due to phenomenal growth of digital content, proliferation of High-Definition (HD) videos and various other interactive applications, growth of online business, and huge requirements of security, storage, resilience, and so on in the corporate world. Also, storage in the ‘cloud’ is becoming increasingly popular as the costs decline and provides on-line storage to support back-up and data recovery.
Micro-servers are small servers that are off-the-shelf appliances, designed for ease of installation and maintenance. It is observed that micro-server has been a popular choice for small to medium sized businesses, owing to which the micro-servers unit shipment growth is expected to remain stronger in the next several years. Overall, the micro-server IC market is anticipated to grow at a CAGR of 67.1% from 2014 to 2020 due to the ongoing technological advancements in the micro-server IC, which can considerably boost the performance of the servers by enabling higher computing capabilities.
The major factors that are driving the media storage and cloud computing applications for the micro-server IC market are the ever increasing growth of digital content; augmented popularity of Video-On-Demand (VOD) content; proliferation of High Definition (HD) videos; the explosive growth of delivery of videos over internet and smartphones; and the multi-fold growth in user-generated content.
The growth in media storage and cloud computing applications has created opportunities micro-server industry players to develop micro-servers that suit the requirement for the media storage industry. For instance, Marvell Semiconductor (U.S.) and SanDisk Corporation (U.S.) have developed a new generation of storage micro-servers for such applications. North America is the market leader for micro-server IC that shared around 43% of the total micro-server market in 2013. Apart from media storage, North America is the market leader in big data analytics and Hadoop software, owing to which it is evident that servers are being deployed in these applications on a large scale in this region.
