Winchester Systems Float On
Winchester Systems Float On
January 2, 2007: American based Storage vendor, Winchester Systems, has recently revealed its age and celebrated 25 years in the storage market by taking a look back at an industry that has taken them from a 5 MB disk offering to a ‘SAN-in-a-Cabinet.’
The company started up in 1981. Back then they were providing external storage solutions for users of Intel computers. Their initial disk product offered just 5 MB of storage, yet it was a big hit and launched the company into what has now been a successful quarter of a century in the industry.
As an indication on how the storage market has changed since 1981, Winchester says they now deliver 1,000,000 times more storage per dollar then they did with their original 5 MB storage product. “This is a phenomenal 74 percent annual compounded increase in storage per dollar or a doubling of storage per dollar every 15 months for 25 years,” says Jerry Namery, chief technology officer for Winchester. Namery believes that this basically proves “that Moore’s law applies to external storage as well as memory.”
Joel Leider, Winchester chief executive officer, says it’s not just the customers and products that have been loyal to Winchester over the years, but also the employees - some of whom have been with the company for over 20 years and assisted in creating the stability and continuity the company required to sustain itself in the market.
As for the storage market itself, no predictions could have foreseen have much change would rapidly progress with the advent of bigger and better technology. “We could not have imagined how people could use a million-fold more storage back then,” says Leider. “But every data intensive storage application has managed to make use of the economics of scale to do better jobs and open up new applications that were not conceivable back then.”
Winchester Systems has seen the market change from applications that merely consisted of text and database to those which required storage for graphics, photos, audio, video and email. The vendor’s flagship product, FlashDisk, is now in its 9th generation with the FlashDisk OpenSAN marketed on a ‘SAN-in-a-Cabinet’ model offering 1.6 million IOPS in just six square feet of space.