2006 Storage Review
2006 Storage Review
December 22, 2006: Before we attack the Christmas pudding and cork the Champaign to welcome in 2007, IDM took a look back at the year that was, especially when it was all about Storage.
In 2006 Storage thrived as organisations continued to seek solutions to their increasing sprawls of data. End users warmed up to hot technologies like storage virtualisation and de-duplication, the focus turned to SMBs, the vendors bought themselves up while growing concern emerged around the consumption of energy in storage infrastructure.
Storage Snap-Ups
EMC led the pack in the race to snap-up smaller vendors and increase its scope in the market. The storage giant bought Avamar (7628) and its De-duplication technology for US$165 million, forked out another $175 million for Network Security and still found change in the pocked to nab RSA Security (7487) for US$2.1 billion.
Joining EMC in the spending spree, Brocade acquired McData, Sun (7206) grabbed StorageTek to claim a full approach to the storage market in the region and Advance Digital Information Corp (ADIC) acquired Australian start-up Rocksoft and its leading de-duplication technology. Meanwhile Symantec stepped up for data centre management though their purchase of data centre change and configuration management software provider, Reliocore. (6973)
Storage snap-ups might be a great way for mega vendors to buy in to emerging technologies, but they also promote storage staff downsizing. Sun set up to cut 5,000 employees after for its StorageTek realignment while EMC consolidated its acquisitions by announcing global employee cuts across the organisation.
The SMB Space
The scope and potential of the SMB market was explored in great depth during 2006 with vendors finding that SMBs are far from immune to the storage challenges of their enterprise cousins. IDC predicted the growth of the market in this space early on in the piece, tipping a ‘breakthrough’ year for storage technology in the SMB space back in early March.
So what was on offer for the SMB space? It was all about bundled storage solutions, and affordable options that are simpler to deploy. Hitachi chased the medium enterprise for a suite of mid-range solutions while Fujitsu Siemens Computers marketed simplicity in the release of ‘Mr Very First SAN.’ HP says it eased up network storage for SMBs through their All-in-One storage system while IBM targeted affordability through the SMB specific release of BladeCenter Kit.
Format Wars
The format wars continued and some of the more controversial stories of the year came from the colourful developments in this space. A team from the university of central Florida developed a way to increase the storage capacity of a standard DVD to over a terabyte, an Indian student claimed to have developed a new method of data storage that could cram 450GB onto a single piece of paper, while an American company (7416) patented its claims of a new compression method that can put 1.28GB of data onto a floppy disk which encrypting the data against terrorist attacks.
But with storage growth continuing, it seems all formats could survive but the disk storage market definitely continued its upward push. Factory revenues for the worldwide disk storage market grew by almost 10 percent since 2005, while both Gartner and IDC reported that disk storage revenue totalled US $3.8 billion in the first quarter of 2006. That was an 8.6 percent increase over the same period last year.
Energy Efficiency
With rising public interest in energy efficiency across 2006 and the UK Stern published in October, it was time to address both the financial and environmental costs of power and cooling, especially in the data centre. Much of the push came from research analysts such as Gartner and Ovum who told us to get serious about greening up IT.
With some reports estimating that energy costs already represent about 10 percent of the standard enterprise’s IT budget, vendors jumped on the opportunity to boost their green reputation and encourage other organisations to follow suit. EMC launched a variety of services to help customers reduce costs and overall energy consumption in data centres while HP (7742) showed of its HP Dynamic Smart Cooling System for the data centre.
Virtualisation
Virtualisation heated up, analysts talked about it, IT decision makers thought about it, while Hitachi announced a landmark shipment of 4,500 intelligent virtual storage controllers and suggested the space is a lucrative market that belongs to them. But Goldman Sachs’ (7045) could not agree, instead they used industry research to boldly suggest that EMC was dominating the race in storage virtualisation.
Meanwhile confusion lived on in the virtualisation space – opening a market for vendors to introduce a range of migration tools and accessories, one such tool was VMware’s converter tool, a product it released for free.
Interoperability
It was the buzz word at Storage Networking World in Sydney this year (Story) but just how far did the SNIA vision stretch across the vendors? Hitachi declared compatibility and interoperability testing between Hitachi storage and IBM zSeries mainframe systems, 7177 while other vendors worked to establish structured programmes to chase interoperability.
SNIA chased the industry and continued to gain momentum with a number of standards developed to address levels of interoperability to help advance storage networking and the industry as a whole.
Meanwhile EMC, Dell and LSI Logic Group chased their own initiative through the launch of the Storage Bridge Bay Working Group (SBB) on a mission to change the way that storage controller cards interface with storage disks. The group has made progress since March 2006 by including IBM, NetApp and Zyratex in its circle and announcing the SBB 1.0 standard.
The Market
With the increasing need for storage showing little change of letting of steam, analysts forecasted promising results for vendors with a hand in on the market. The IDC storage tracker (7471) demonstrated a 8.6 percent growth in the worldwide storage market (check) Rhoda Phillips, research manager for IDC storage said “with customers buying and installing record amounts of storage hardware capacity, the need for storage software has never been greater.”
Disaster recovery remained a strong driver for the market in 2006. For the US Federal Communications Commission, it was all about the ‘War on Terror.’ The FCC requested Internet Service Providers to store data for two years, a step-up for the mandatory requirement of US ISPs to hold records for 90 days.
Meanwhile Microsoft (7191) stepped up to consolidate its position its storage market position. “The next step of our storage strategy is working on complete solutions - a single way to manage servers and storage and content-addressable storage," said Claude Lorenson, Microsoft’s group product manager of storage technologies.
For Google, there were some embarrassing leaks in the storage space. For one, a ‘dirty document’ (7026) revealed Google’s plans for unlimited online storage. HDS took on board the EMC meanwhile lashed out at competitors at the EMC World 2006, with record figures for attendance and a number of products released.
In 2006 however, it was all about HP. Not just their storage related release, but their infamous spy case, their endless headlines in the US and move to restabilised themselves as a more then reputable employer. HP finalised the year by paying out US$14.5 million to resolve civil claims stemming from the recent investigation scandal that rocked the company. (7800)