March II

March is the time when the industry tallies up the previous year's storage numbers, 2013 being no exception!
So let me start with a couple statements and links from IDC regarding the 2012 status of the worldwide storage industry:
First, the official IDC press release, it states that "...the external disk storage systems market generated $24.7 billion in sales during the full year, which represented a 4.7% increase over 2011. Total external disk storage systems capacity shipped during the year surpassed 20 exabytes, which represents an increase of 27% over 2011."

Storage Newsletter and The Register both had great comments and a couple more insights beyond the naked numbers, like the one here from Storage Newsletter: "The storage industry continues to be one of the most successful sector in the IT industry, with total disk systems revenues growing yearly since 2002 except in 2009. But the growth is diminishing. It was 17.4% from 2009 to 2010 then 8.2% from 2010 to 2011 and 4.8% from 2011 to 2012 even if the total capacity shipped continues to explode. It means that the price per gigabyte continues to decline rapidly. Among the reasons: lower price of HDDs, several technologies to reduce total storage capacity of the systems (thin provisioning, compression, de-dupe)."
And finally, a breakdown for the EMEA numbers here.

Agree, these numbers are mostly about HDDs. Technology based on SSDs still play a very minor role in the overall external storage market and occupy a small (but growing) niche. According to Ambuj Goyal, newly appointed head of IBM's Storage Group, this could change soon: "Our play is the all-flash array for transaction processing, not hybrids (arrays combining disk and solid state storage)."

Changing topics: According to the latest Quorum Disaster Recovery Report, natural disasters account for only 5% of the IT outages for SMB customers, see here what the other 95% are!

And talking about DR: Here's the latest speed record for data transfer across optical fibre: "According to a statement from the OFC/NFOEC organizers, AT&T was able to send 400Gbps data transmissions more than 7,456 miles with minimal loss, thanks to new materials and a new modulation technique. Team leader Xiang Zhou said that his setup addresses several key concerns for next-generation networks."