June III

Happy Birthday, IBM!

Here's a great clip about the Centennial from IBM Switzerland

(in German),

or the full-length worldwide version here as well as the official "100 Year" press release.

June II

IDC has published their analysis of the worldwide Q1 2011 storage market and they find, that not only did the total shipped (disk storage) capacity increase by 46% , but also revenue grew by 13%.
After all, there might be some truth to the repeated claims that the area of ever cheaper storage will slowly come to an end? Or as ESG's Steve Duplessie brilliantly puts it: "The next storage war will be economic-lead".

Contributing to that fact may also be that parts of the market (and thus the industry) seem to be moving to the more expensive SSD and even PCM (phase-change memory) technology (away from classic hard-disk drives).
Mostly for performance reasons and forced by the need for real-time data analytics - Big Data is the buzzword of the moment here!

So an exciting new industry is being established with lots of startups (like Violin) and venture-capital involved. Watch this space!

And if you felt like there was too much "cloud" in our industry recently, here's someone who certainly agrees: Tom Trainer describes why "monolithic scale-out-NAS" is not what a real storage cloud should be: "True cloud storage is a disruptive paradigm shift" as he states!

June

Three updates today about SSD, FCoE, and unstructered data (aka Big Data).

Let's start with the SSD news: You probably know that a brand new SSD device behaves much different than a used one, this is related to the fact that write operations cannot be done "in place" and thus there is a considerable amount of "garbage collection" going on once the device has been used to capacity. The SNIA now has published what I believe is the first set of specs to perform standardized (and thus comparable) measurement of solid-state disk performance.

Read this excellent article in Computerworld here.

Also related to SNIA: Rob Peglar, a well known SNIA representative recently took over the CTO position at Isilon/EMC.

Read here what he has to say about "Big Data", why he thinks deduplication is not a useful technology for "Big Data" (agree!) and why disk is a superior archive media for "Big Data" (disagree!).

And lastly, here's a great presentation from the May "Interop" conference in Las Vegas about the convergence of data center networks: "FCoE vs. iSCSI: Making the Choice"

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.