NVMeFirst, let me state that QoM stands for Question of the Month. Doing these forecast can be a lot of work, and rather than focusing my whole blog on weekly forecast questions and answers, I would like to do something else as well. So, from now on we are doing only one new forecast a month.

So for the first question of 2016, we will forecast whether NVMe SSDs will be GA'd in enterprise storage over the next year.

NVM Express (NVMe) means the new PCIe interface for SSD storage. Wikipedia has a nice description of NVMe. As discussed there, NVMe was designed for higher performance and enhanced parallelism which comes with the PCI Express (PCIe) bus. The current version of the NVMe spec is 1.2a (available here).

GA means generally available for purchase by any customer.

Enterprise storage systems refers to mid-range and enterprise class storage systems from major AND non-major storage vendors, which includes startups.

Over the next year means by 19 January 2017.

Special thanks to Kacey Lai (@mrdedupe), Primary Data for suggesting this months question.

Current and updates to previous forecasts

 

Update on QoW 15-001 (3DX) forecast:

News out today indicates that 3DX (3D XPoint non-volatile memory) samples may be available soon but it could take another 12 to 18 months to get it into production. 3DX manufacturing is more challenging than current planar NAND technology and uses about 100 new materials, many of which are currently single sourced. We already built into our 3DX forecast potential delays in reaching production in 6 months. The news above says this could be worse than  expected. As such, I feel even stronger that there is less of a possibility of 3DX shipping in storage systems by next December. So I would update my forecast for QoW 15-001 to NO with an 0.75 probability at this time.

So current forecasts for QoW 15-001 are:

A) YES with 0.85 probability; and

B) NO with 0.75 probability

Current QoW 15-002 (3D TLC) forecast

We have 3 active participants, current forecasts are:

A) Yes with 0.95 probability;

B) No with 0.53 probability; and

C) Yes with 1.0 probability

Current QoW 15-003 (SMR disk) forecast

We have 1 active participant, current forecast is:

A) Yes with 0.85 probability