Industry Trends

With the explosion of data in the information age there is a strong demand for better, faster, and more efficient ways to store, process, and serve data to the market. Servers and storage manufacturers are rapidly developing solutions for the data-hungry market. FPGAs and CPLDs are increasingly taking center stage in a variety of applications. Disk arrays, tape libraries, data security appliances, storage area network (SAN) switches, and high-performance computing servers are a few of the applications taking advantage of FPGA features (see Figure 1). Both the server and storage markets forecast strong steady growth, as shown in Table 1.

Note:

1. CAGR = Compound annual growth rate

Figure 1. Computer and Storage Applications

Note:

1. JBOD = Just a bunch of disks

Key trends in the server and storage market include:

• Achieving high throughput and protection for data storage with RAID algorithms
• Securing/protecting data for servers and storage with encryption algorithms for data at rest (storage) and data in motion (servers)
• Increasing storage capacity without increasing cost of storage with data compression
• Monitoring and managing server farms remotely by controlling the keyboard and mouse of individual servers over an Ethernet link
• Accelerating server applications in hardware