Friday, January 29, 2010

Storage Buzz January 2010


I took a work related break to blogging. Today I am back with the firm intent to return to a regular update scheme!

The focus of my blog will slightly change to a more general view and news on storage and all the "buzzwords du jour" related to it.

One of them is certainly "Clouds" in all shapes and colors. You can test your cloud knowledge here!

A few of us, however, are convinced that the current cloud-hype will go away as it happened to similar concepts in the past. I couldn't agree more!

A very down-to-earth and proven technology got a major boost just this week when IBM Research demonstrated a new record breaking 29 billio bits per square inch of data density on a tape device.
See the video here!
If you wonder who is going to use all that capacity, check out the latest "How Much Information" report, released end of 2009.

On the business side, Oracle finalized the acquisition of Sun this week and was quick to assure their customers that they have a solid roadmap for the former STK and Sun storage products. Which remains to be seen...
The overall outlook for the 2010 storage market seems to be rather bright: An increasing number of reports indicate that the worst may be over (here and here).
Which is no surprise taking into account the steady increase of amounts of data all companies, small and large are supposed to handle and manage!
(For your reference: the IDC and Gartner numbers for Q3 2009)