Monday, June 15, 2009

Storage Buzz June I


First things first: The FCoE standard has reportedly been finalized these days and you may expect the pace of announcements in the field of "converged network" storage gear to rise for the 2nd half of 2009.

Here's what IBM's Clod Barrera has to say about FCoE.

In a related move, IBM has re-entered the networking business!
Networking products are part of our "Dynamic Infrastructure" initiative and IBM is acknowleding the fact that server, storage, and networks are all key building blocks for an IT Infrastructure and customers want to have an option to source everything from one company.
(interestingly, some of the news releases from 1999 announcing the withdrawal of IBM from the networking business are still online.)

The networking war is also heating up on the fibre channel (FC) side of the market: Brocade reportedly gained market share versus CISCO and there may be various reasons for this:
a) CISCOs strong focus on FCoE (and therefor lack of focus on 8 Gbps FC)
b) CISCOs announcement to enter the market for blade servers which lets server vendors like HP and IBM scratch their heads and think twice about partnering with CISCO.

And lastly -looking at the first quarter market numbers- the good news is that data growth is continuing despite the crisis. However, data storage revenue is declining for the first time in many years and I'm personally convinced that this fact will lead to further consolidation in the market for the rest of the year.

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Storage Buzz, April


Please note that I have changed the title of this blog to "Storage Buzz" since I have increasingly been focusing on more than "storage networks" only.
Spring has arrived and I'll try to get back to a more regular schedule of updates.

I have been overwhelmed with tasks in my new role here at IBM and am slowly catching up now. Here's a rundown of some of the top news from the last couple weeks in no specific order:

The hype around FCoE seems to cool down a bit as first products enter the market this year, here's two noteworthy links:
Brocade announcing their implementation of a "top-of-rack" FCoE and FC switch and CISCO venturing into the market of bladeservers (of course with a focus on tight integration with the datacenter network and VMware (which they partially own).

SSDs enjoy an unchaged level of attention from the industry and SNIA did release a first set of materials around the topic, allowing clients to get a vendor-neutral view on the subject (presentations from SNW 2009 here).

Have you heard of Kryder's Law? Well, if not, you might want to read more about it here and learn that spinning disks will most likely be around for another couple of years at least!

And with ever more (important!) data being stored on all kind of media, it will be more important to protect/encrypt data on any storage media in the future: The largest disk drive manufacturers have just recently agreed on a TCG standard to support interoperability for encrypted devices and integration with major key management systems.

And just this week, EMC did release their first approach on building a "clustered storage system" or Virtual Matrix how they name it. See also the article on Byte&Switch.
Please note that IBM already sells iteration number XIV of a similar, revolutionary architecture!

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Storage Buzz, January 2009


New year, new name! I have changed the name of this blog to represent the fact that I will be dealing with the entire storage platform in 2009 instead of "only" storage networking!

My daily job keeps me pretty busy these days, so I have to limit my blogging to an absolute minimum for the time being.
Here's one to start the year: Top Innovations of 2008!
And IBM just announced a pretty solid 2008 and a rosy outlook to 2009!
(I picked an Autralian source because two of my kids currently travel down under)