May

Did you ever wonder which are the biggest storage companies in terms of revenue? Across all segments and technologies, just sheer size?

Well, here's that list and surprisingly, the "component" companies like Seagate, WD or SanDisk have much higher revenues than the "system" vendors like Netapp and HP.

With the notable exception of EMC obviously.

However, there are signs that the hard-disk vendors might be loosing some of their share of the storage industry in the next couple years: The industry is on the verge of completely redefining storage tiers with the advent of affordable SSD technology (for primary, active data), high capacity HDDs (for backup and inactive data) and huge capacity tape (for archive and last-resort backup data).

Even though we had some bad news about "sanitization" of SSDs published recently. So when moving to an all-SSD storage environment, clients may well want to think about encrypting that data first!

And lastly (and probably much welcome to connect high-performance SSD systems in the future) Brocade has announced their first 16 Gbps SAN gear last week! Find the product details here.

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.

February

Todays 100-story is around IBMs invention of the "Magnetic Hard Disk" back in 1956.

Check out the details and background here.

February

Celebrating 100 Years of IBM this year!

Check out the first one in a series of Centennial Films.

January II

Above: IBM's first patent issued in 1911 ... and a record number of 5896 patents for IBM last year!

January 2011

Welcome to 2011! Did you know what 2003, 2011 and 2017 have in common?

They are all prime numbers! There was no prime number year between 1951 and 1973 and this period was probably also the longest period of economic growth in the 20th century, so my theory is .... (no, I don't want to go there!)

To summarize the old year and start off the new one, here's a couple articles for you to be prepared:

An acquisition overview from last year (and the years past): We are counting 57 mergers and acquisitions in the storage industry in 2010 which is up from 2009 but still not even close to the peak of 105 back in 2006. The article also has a nice list of who bought whom in 2010.

Then there is the preview of the top storage trends in 2011 ("will we have Storage-in-a-box") and an outlook on what the key players may be up to in 2011 ("will Oracle buy Netapp?").

And from the technology perspective, here's a great paper from IBM Research on the "Trends in Storage Technology" which goes way beyond 2011.