Friday, June 25, 2010

Storage Buzz July


Rumours about a potential acquisition of Storwize, a US/Israel-based company, through IBM have been buzzing around the market recently. Storwize has been partnering with IBM for a while and their "RACE" (random access compression engine) based solution has been tested by IBM (see the joint whitepaper here). For IBM's newly found focus on file storage solutions, the acquisition could make a lot of sense and would nicely complement the block-storage ProtecTIER solutions.

Coming from the same geographical region, startup Anobit has announced plans to build enterprise class SSD storage based on the lower-cost MLC (multi-level-cell) SSD technology. If successful, this technology could actually speed up replacement of high-performance Fibre Channel and SAS drives with SSD based drives in enterprises. The Storage Magazin June issue had a couple of useful articles around the HDD vs. SSD topic and summarizes the status of the discussions pretty well.

And lastly, if you follow the "Fussball-Weltmeisterschaft", here's the most comprehensive overview tool by far!

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Storage Buzz June III

Strange World these days: A storage company announces networking architectures and a networking company reveals NAS products:
Read here about the details of Brocade One and visit Amazon to order your next NAS system from CISCO!

Friday, June 4, 2010

Storage Buzz June II


Looks like our industry has finally turned the corner, here's the quarterly IDC report for worldwide external storage revenues (Press release):
Two facts are certainly noteworthy:
a) The capacity sold is back to a "healthy" +50% range growth year-over-year with worldwide shipments of 3400 Petabytes.
b) We have been expecting and forecasting huge growth in unstructered and NAS data - well it is showing in the latest report: The NAS market grew a remarkable 44% y/y!