Wednesday, March 14, 2012

March II

This weeks news are about files, tape, optics, and how they all -when combined- can help solve data-growth problems!

Data growth is reflected once again in the 2011 IDC report: "Total disk storage systems capacity shipped reach 6,279 petabytes, growing 22.4% year over year."  This is still a huge growth, however, compared to the 2010 and 2009 numbers (56% and 34% compared to the previous year!) they reflect not only the production shortage due to the Thailand flooding in Q4, but also the fact, that capacity expansion with HDDs has considerably slowed down in the last three years. Find additional comments here.

Related to that report, IDC has also released the Storage Software numbers for the full year of 2011. They reported worldwide storage software sales of over 14 billion USD, an increase of almost 12% compared to 2010!
Most of the client investments for HW and SW theses days go into file storage, the area of unstructured (and too often also uncontrolled!) data. This is causing havoc to traditional methods of managing and operating enterprise storage and may force businesses to look into revolutionary new ways of dealing with information (once more!), as outlined in this ESG article: "People riskedeverythingwhen they ran from big companies like DEC to a little goofball company like Microsoft. They risked their jobs when they didn’t buy storage from Big Blue and instead went with unheard of EMC. They risked their ponytails and birkenstocks when they boughttoastersfrom NetApp".

But beware, just "any cloud" won't do it!
How does tape come into the play? Well, read here about a smart new way to combine the ease-of-use of NAS and the low-costs of tape data. And read here why many in the industry are convinced that tape still has some great potential!
Which has lead in the past to almost religious wars about which storage is right!

Lastly, from research, I came across two exciting news items:
The IBM Research Hall of Fame has two new members: Lubomyr Romankiw and David Thompson were both honored for their achievements around magnetic memory innovations which enables many of today's HDD products.
And related to very recent research, IBM released news about a break-thru in optical data transfer, using a device dubbed "optochip", see details here.

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