Friday, January 18, 2013

January 2013

It's January, it's cold and it's dark...time to book summer vacation - and review pictures from last year's summer vacation!
Although we got some snow in Zurich and we are reasonably well equipped to deal with snow and ice, the Canadians do it even better...very impressive parade of Snowplows!


Continuing with my December post on 2013 strategy statements and economic outlooks, here's the insights from HP's David Scott, Netapp's Jay Kid as well as a listing of the 15 most promising storage startups for the new year.
Even more interesting though is the list from a year ago (on that same link above) and the comparison between the two lists:
Some companies went from "most promising" to "unknown" (like Coraid) while others made it back onto that same list again (like Violin, ranked 2nd) or have been acquired (like XtremIO by EMC) or are well established brand names by now (like Dropbox).
You will notice that many of the listed companies are involved with some sort of SSD technology and solutions, the most exciting real product hitting the market these days is probably the Crucial 500, a 1 TB SSD drive for consumers which sells for under 600$!

Also in 2013, the industry expects the first SATA Express products, based on a 16 Gbps SATA standard which is under development. See the SATA-IO website here for details and this site here for additional information and resources.

Lastly, on the topic of the recent revival of tape, here's a great article by Jon Toigo: "The most important metric you're likely to confront in the next 10 to 20 years is the cost and availability of electricity."
Read here how he thinks SSD and Tape could be combined to address these challenges.
The Leibniz Supercomputer Center (LRZ) in Germany already uses this approach very successfully! Here's the related IBM Press Release.