Thursday, July 2, 2015

July

The first heat wave is on us this week with temperature forecasts of up to 37C in Zurich - and with it starts Summer vacation time! So if you are headed for the beach or the mountains: Enjoy and don't worry about business during these lazy days of Summer!







If you, like myself, enjoy reading, I can recommend "No Ordinary Disruption" by Dobbs, Manyika, and Woetzel - a team of McKinsey researchers. It summarizes and explains the four major disruptive trends for the early 21st century which are:
  1. Urbanization
  2. Accelerating Technology Change
  3. An Aging World (changing demographics)
  4. Global Connections
As you can guess, at least two of them have a very close relationship to our industry (Technology Change and Global Connections) and the authors provide a clear and sometimes scary view of how these disruptions will change our world in the years to come.

Couple news around storage base technologies - HDD and SDD:

IDC just released the Q1 2015 worldwide storage revenue numbers. As every quarter since Carter was president of the U.S., the capacity sold grew double digit: "Total capacity shipments were up 41.1% year over year to 28.3 exabytes during the quarter."
Somewhat hidden in the charts is the fact that "ODM" (which IDC defines as ".. storage systems sales by original design manufacturers (ODM's) selling directly to hyperscale datacenter customers) accounted for 12.6% of global spending during the quarter - an increase of 23% compared to Q1 2014. Which means in my own terms that "the cloud" is the 3rd biggest storage vendor in Q1 2015! Agree?

Capacity-wise, the first 10TB disk drives are on the horizon: HGST announced a helium-based SMR drive (shingled magnetic recording) to be available later this year. As you may know, SMR drives lend themselves to "write-once type" of usage patterns. Read the above article for the detailed technical reasons for that behavior!

"SSDs are expected to eventually dominate HDDs in laptops and desktops, but that isn't expected to happen for years. At the end of last year, SSDs were only in about 15% of new notebooks.
And, prices for SSDs are many times higher than that of HDDs.
For example, a data center-class HDD with 6TB of capacity sells for $185 today and will drop to about $165 by the end of the year -- about 3 cents per gigabyte, according to market research firm Gartner. A 4TB HDD for a laptop sells for $95 to computer manufacturers or about 2 cents per gigabyte"
Read this great summary (Computerworld) on the race for capacity and price between the various HDD and SSD technologies!

Lastly, switching to the topic of hyperconverged: Nutanix has made some waves about an upcoming new solution: "Nutanix is working on a scale-out file server and thinks it will set the cat among the pigeons in array-land, especially NetApp's filer business."
They are positioning themselves for an upcoming IPO as you can see from these comments in the finance industry, so obviously try to dress up for Wall St. these days!

My company Avnet, by the way, is greatly positioned to help our clients and partners to grow into the era of "Converged" or "Hyperconverged" and take advantage of the cost, ease of use and flexibility benefits of these solutions. Watch this short video here to see what Avnet can do for you!