January

Happy New Year!

Let's start off the new year with some thoughts who might be driving our industry in 2012.

CNN just announced their "Four Horsemen of Tech" for 2012 which noteable inlcudes a "Horsewoman" representing a very old company as well: IBM! Can you identify the other three guys?

And for startups of the year, here's the list from the "Storage Newsletter".

December II

One of the future technologies for non-volatile storage is perceived to be the "racetrack" memory, developped in the IBM labs.
Looks like we are another step closer to making this a feasible alternative to Flash-Memory (as its used today in SSD devices).
See the press release and the detailled comment from Computerworld.

On a funny note, ome reading here about China and the Chinese from my favorite Insdustry Analyst and Frequent Traveler Steve D. at ESG.

December

To start with today, let's resume the cloud topic from my last post.

Here's another great summary (by Steve Duplessie) on how, where, and when cloud storage and cloud services may make sense:

"Why do people use these services? Because A: doing it yourself SUCKS, and B: the cost of letting someone else deal with it is at the inflection point–it’s becoming inarguable when you know that A: it sucks to do yourself and B: it’s now cheaper to do it elsewhere."

The current flooding in Thailand is a terrible event and our hearts go out to the people effected and those working to resolve it!

The flooding and its consequences will affect the HDD industry in many ways for the next couple of months as this Computerworld article lines out:

"In the first half of 2011, Thailand accounted for 40% to 45% of worldwide hard disk drive production! As of early November, nearly half of Thailand's production was directly affected by the flooding."

An intersting move from NetApp to add another flavor of scale-out NAS to their product lineup. According to this article here, they plan to bundle LUSTRE, the open source high performance file system, with their E-Series arrays (aka LSI!) to create a scale-out NAS system for the HPC market.

And lastly, the Q3 2011 IDC numbers are in: the worldwide disk market grew to $7.6 Mio in revenue and capacity shipped increased by 31% (y/y) to reach 5.4 EB (Exabytes) or 5429 PB (Petabytes) for the quarter!

Here's some additional analysis and graphs for these numbers!

November

October is missing in my posts - I just realize. It has been a very busy time, but fortunately also including some days off with my family!

So it's time to catch up on some recent developments in the storage industry... or should I say cloud industry? The picture here (taken in Lisbon) kind of reminds me of the cloud value proposition: only have parts of the building and use the cloud as the "roof"?!

Having said that: how would you like unlimited cloud storage for 10$ a month? Well, there's a company offering just this. They claim that by deduplicating and compressing data, they are able to offer such an attractive price.

One of the major "events" in October was sadly the passing of Steve Jobs who leaves a big void at Apple (I'm convinced!). One of his quotes back from 1993 especially struck me:
"Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me." [The Wall Street Journal, May 25, 1993]"
In his very special way, he has probably achieved both things in his life! (there's a couple other quotes from him here).

And then - in one way or another kind of related to Steve and his company - here's a couple other interesting articles:
A short history of social media
do you remember Geocities or Friendster?
A project to make available the archives of the Montreux Jazz Festival
1.2PB of storage will hold 40 years of performances at the Festival!
The Ten Commandements of the American Religion
and Rule #1 is: Own a Home!
147 companies own everything
Three systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ) have taken a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide and analyzed all 43,060 transnational corporations and share ownerships linking them.

In another indication of the heavy market dominance of VMware in the hypervisor market, they now think about introducing a new concept and way to provision storage to VM hosts: getting away with LUNs and /or NFS and introducing what they call "storage containers". Even if this new concept will never hit the market, I am personally convinced that whoever offers the best integration with VMware will be succesful in that storage segment in the future!

And lastly, one comment about FcoE ("why FCoE is dead but not burried yet") and a 55th Birthday! RAMAC was introduced some 55 years ago, the first "hard disk drive" as we know it.

September II

Exciting news from the hard-disk vendors this week: it seems that we are about to start the rollout of the 4 TB disk drive options.
The one example on the left originates from Seagate, but Hitachi actually was a day early to announce their first 1 TB platter.

The HDD industry overall did again very well in Q2: Over 167 Mio drives sold in just three months (2Q 2011), so SSD technology does not really seem to have a real impact on the HDD market so far, my impression is that SSDs are mainly used in new market segements today (like the Apple iPad) and most PCs and laptops on the shelves of electronis retailers are obviously still based on HDD storage.

This is even more true for the enterprise storage market, see the Q2 tally from IDC here.
My opinion: as soon as more then 50% of PCs and Laptops sold will be SSD based, we will probably be at a price point where using SSDs in large-scale enterprise storage systems becomes economically feasible.

Eventually -in a couple years- HDDs will be replaced be the "next big thing" in storage anyway, this may be "Racetrack" technology developped by IBM.

September

I'm back from vacation, business trips and other summer fun! A lot going on in the worldwide economy and politics these days, not so much on the storage front though.

Let me summarize some of the key news there from the past couple weeks:

Lots of hype still around FCoE, here's an excellent summary of where the industry is today. I've had quite a few discussions around this topic recently and my personal opinion is this: unless the (FCoE) industry manages to get to an accepted standard where clients will be able to connect FCoE native (storage) devices and FCoE switches without being forced to juggle dozens of interop matrices, FCoE will be going nowhere!

Take iSCSI as an example: iSCSI storage connects to any standard IP network and switch and clients don't have to first verify if device XYZ supports switch ABC.

Even more hyped is the "Big Data" theme: Read in this article why "there's really no such thing as big data"!

By the way: one of the books I took along to the beach this summer is "Innovators Dilemma", I can highly recommend it, it has lots of examples and details about the hard-disk industry; to make the case why big companies ("incumbents") usually fail to spot new market niches and disruptive technologies.

Talking about "big": While others talk about big data, IBM actually builds big data, read here!

And to close on a sad note: HP seems really lost these days, the article here in WSJ says it all.

June III

Happy Birthday, IBM!

Here's a great clip about the Centennial from IBM Switzerland

(in German),

or the full-length worldwide version here as well as the official "100 Year" press release.