Opinion

posted on 21 May 2008 22:31

Too much; the level of activity in the storage market in the first five months of 2008 has been unparalleled. Commencing wih IBM's acquisition of XIV in January there has been a near non-stop stream of new products and acquisitions and partnerships and start-ups.

Why? What has been the driver or drivers?

Looking back and across these five months there is one great big fat obvious driver - data growth. If there wasn't so much data around, especially the unstructured sort, with a whole lot more coming, then there wouldn't have been the need for IBM to buy a scale-out clustered storage hardware/software company like XIV. IBM has just announced a new Global Archive Centre in Mexico too - again it's data and the need to keep it for decades or more that's driving this.

just think of a as - it's a hackneyed phrase - a perfect storm hitting the storage market. Let's list some pressure points:

1. Data centers are getting full. There is no more power in many places and there is no more space yet there is a ceaseless, relentless tide of new data to be stored.

2. Web 2.0 applications like Facebook, salesforce.com, and many, many more are generating data like some crazed factory spewing out more and more widgets. Millions of bytes, billions of bytes, trillions of bytes are simply flooding into massive and massively growing data centres.

3. Cloud computing with online backup the tip of a potentially tidal wave of data flowing from billions of users and small business computers into online stores.

4. Legal and compliance data storage needs causing yet more data to be stored and in an organised and accessible way. The simple old back it up to tape days are soon going to be as foreign to many of us as punched cards and paper tape.

Storage vendors read the IDC and other research house reports and listen to the Gartner and Forrester analyses. They hear what their customers are saying. They look at startups like Isilon better storing billions of files; they look at Data Domain, Diligent, Avamar and other dedupers showing the way to successfully and radically shrink the backup data mountain ranges, and they move, boy, do they move.

There has been an acquisition frenzy. Look at IBM, steadily munching its way through a constant stream of technology companies: XIV; Diligent; FilesX and more. Look at EMC buying like it knows nothing else; Mozy and Iomega being just two of its many, many acquisitions. And Dell, that old OEM'ming masterclass, has launched out on the acquisition trail buying EqualLogic and service companies.

Recent startups are flowering into fully-fledged companies as they turn their better, faster, cheaper ways of storing enterprise data into sustainable businesses: think 3PAR; Compellent; and Pillar. The iSCSI vendors have come of age, like LeftHand. Tape HW vendors are recovering from the D2D onslaught and mixing it with the disk array vendors. Backup software vendors are embracing D2D and VTL and dedupe. There has been a veritable burst of renewal amongst the backup HW/SW vendor ranks.

And VMware has triggered an almost instant falling in of the storage ranks behind virtualized servers and the need to network storage and feed it to greedy virtual machines and then protect their data.

We have had an extraordinary burst of creative technological inventiveness in storage: Atrato and its disk canisters; Xiotech and its sealed ISEs; HP and its Extreme Data Storage System; EMC and Hulk/Maui, a work in progress; Caringo and re-invented CAS.

Brocade and Cisco have their over-arching data centre switch ideas to co-ordinate compute, storage and network resources in virtualized data centres.

NetApp keeps re-inventing its solution offering from the inside-out. HDS ties up with Blue-Arc and extends its USP controllers into the file space. Sun casually makes ZFS openly available. Is there any storage supplier standing still?

We're seeing 2.5-inch drives and SAS 2 6Gbit/s drives coming as the disk manufacturers look to get more data out of a disk array shelf and do it in less time. And then there is flash, responding to the need to get data out of arrays a heck of a lot faster than disk spindles can. In just a few short months FSC predicted flash SSDs would be in the data center by 2011, EMC announced a flash tier in Symmetrix, Seagate and Intel piled openly into the flash SSD game, and HDS has just followed suite.

Now SanDisk and EMC are talking energetically about flash drives replacing Fibre Channel drives wholesale from 2010 onwards.

The storage supplier market has started exploding with creativity and energy. What was revolutionary in January is acceptable in March; it's clear that there is wholesale renewal and reinvention going on.

As I write Spring is shading into Summer and plants, shrubs and trees are bursting into leaf and flower. So too is it high Spring in the storage market and it is hard to keep up and get far enough from the trees to take stock of, to get a sense of the shape of, the new woods and forests growing up around us.

But what fun it is trying to keep with it all, with storage technology and suppliers' developments as the storage market tries to keep up with the data flood. What a place to be, this intersection where storage technology rubber hits the data road. I'm a storage adrenalin junkie and loving it.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}