April II

...and then there were three: Seagate to acquire Samsungs HDD business

(and YES, I'm old enough to remember that famous album from 1978).

1978 was also the year when IBM stopped marketing the IBM 2314 direct access storage facility (aka disk system).

April

Lots of activities to cover from the last couple of weeks. Let me start with the most recent ones and then working backwards in time.

Spring time means a lot of industry events and conferences going on, here's the agenda and presentation links from the SNW last week in Santa Clara, CA.

IBM's own EMEA Technical University took place in Prague last week as well and one thing I noticed was the very frequent mentioning of "Hadoop" in a couple of storage related sessions. This got me interested and here's a couple of links about it:

From the enterprise storage forum and Wikipedia, from the cloudera company site and if you want to learn even more, here's a book for you!

Here's one (and another one) reason why we need these file systems which can handle massive amounts of data and parallel access to run data analytics against them.

On the M&A front, there was a surprising move by Netapp to acquire LSI Engenio, here's some potential reasons behind that move.

Less surprising probably was the move of Western Digital to acquire HGST (the disk manufacturing arm of Hitachi).

I guess the hard disk industry is starting to feel the squeeze from future "storage class memory" implementations like SSDs and (further out) potentially "racetrack memory".

And finally a look into exciting new startups in the realm of storage,

I think the exciting times in the storage industry are far from over yet!

This is also reflected in the 2010 market numbers and trends as collected and summarized by IDC here:

Total disk storage systems capacity shipped reached 5,127 Petabytes, growing 55,7% year-over-year.