January 31, 2011 – We’ve seen some impressive financial reports from the storage sector over the last week or so, but Spectra Logic’s caught my eye. The company recently reported on the first half of its fiscal year, which ended December 31.
Bearing in mind that this a company that focuses primarily on tape libraries (although it also sells disk-based backup systems): Spectra Logic’s overall revenue grew 34% year-over-year, but the real shocker was that revenue from its enterprise tape library line (T-Finity and Spectra T950) grew a whopping 60% and unit shipments grew about 100%.
Revenue from Spectra Logic’s T50e and T120 tape libraries grew 54%, and the company’s total tape library and media revenues increased more than 50% year-over-year.
As I -- and many others -- have said many times before, reports of the death of tape have been greatly exaggerated.
Company officials cited increased demand for tape libraries in applications such as active archives and cloud computing as driving forces behind the revenue growth.
Spectra Logic also got a strong assist from its channel partners, where revenue increased 70% year over year.
Oracle-Sun-StorageTek
Meanwhile, at the high end of the tape market, Oracle announced the T10000C tape drive, which has a native capacity of 5TB and a native transfer rate of 240MBps. That’s more than 3X the capacity of LTO-5 tape drives, and 1.7X the transfer rate of LTO-5 (which is by a long shot the most popular tape format today).
The T10000C drives are available with native 4Gbps Fibre Channel interfaces or native FICON interfaces for connection to mainframes. The drives include inline encryption that does not degrade the 240Mbps performance, according to Tom Wultich, Oracle’s director of product management for storage.
Integrating the T10000C drive (which carries an Oracle-Sun-StorageTek brand) into Oracle’s high-end tape libraries (the SL8500 and SL3000) enables users to scale to a native capacity of 500PB. Assuming 2:1 compression, which is fairly standard in the tape arena, users can scale to an exabyte.
If archives keep expanding at a blistering pace, we’ll have to get used to that term ‘exabyte,’ which is one quintillion bytes (and conjures up fond memories of the company that used to go by that name).
Related blog post:
Who says tape is dead?
Monday, January 31, 2011
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
EMC sets revenue records, again
January 25, 2011 – I couldn’t find an iota of bad news in EMC’s Q4 and year-end financial report today, so I turned to the financial analyst community. They couldn’t find anything negative either, although a few of them noted that, going forward, EMC may face more hurdles than it’s used to facing.
While generally praising EMC’s report, Technology Business Research (TBR) analyst Greg Richardson noted that “TBR expects EMC to face headwinds from multiple forces as it attempts to expand in the midmarket. Although the company posted 22% year-to-year growth in mid-tier revenue in 4Q10, we believe EMC will be forced to adjust its services model in order to win in the channel against NetApp, which leaves whitespace for channel partners to utilize their own services when deploying and supporting NetApp products.”
Richardson also noted that “Additionally, EMC will face a hurdle in the form of public cloud adoption. As customers become increasingly more comfortable and trusting of the cloud’s security, TBR expects adoption of public cloud to increase, particularly in the price-sensitive low end of the midmarket.”
And Stifel Nicolaus analyst Aaron Rakers noted that, going forward, EMC could face increasing competition at the high end (Symmetrix) of the market, particularly from Hitachi (Virtual Storage Platform), IBM (refreshed DS8000) and from 3PAR now that HP owns that company.
Other than those potential future challenges, everything’s coming up roses for EMC.
The company set records across the board in Q410 and for the full year. Fourth quarter revenue was $4.9 billion, up 19% over Q409. GAAP net income increased 61% year-over-year to $628.6 million. GAAP diluted earnings per share were up 53%. EMC closed the quarter with $9.5 billion in cash and investments.
For the full year (2010), EMC’s revenue was $17 billion, an increase of 21% over 2009 revenue. GAAP net income increased a whopping 75% to $1.9 billion, and diluted earnings per share were up 66%.
EMC executives expect 2011 revenue to be in the $19.6 billion range.
Diving a little deeper into EMC’s fourth quarter numbers: Symmetrix revenue increased 19% vs. Q4 2009, and revenue from the company’s mid-tier lineup (Clariion, Celerra, Centera, Data Domain, etc.) was up 23%. Revenue from majority-owned VMware was up 38%.
Looking ahead, I’m sure EMC will get a nice boost when the Isilon product line ramps, and I also expect very positive results from the recently introduced VNX/VNXe unified storage product line. And with the large amount of cash on hand, expect EMC to make some more acquisitions this year, most likely in the cloud and virtualization spaces.
Related article:
EMC announces 41 new products
While generally praising EMC’s report, Technology Business Research (TBR) analyst Greg Richardson noted that “TBR expects EMC to face headwinds from multiple forces as it attempts to expand in the midmarket. Although the company posted 22% year-to-year growth in mid-tier revenue in 4Q10, we believe EMC will be forced to adjust its services model in order to win in the channel against NetApp, which leaves whitespace for channel partners to utilize their own services when deploying and supporting NetApp products.”
Richardson also noted that “Additionally, EMC will face a hurdle in the form of public cloud adoption. As customers become increasingly more comfortable and trusting of the cloud’s security, TBR expects adoption of public cloud to increase, particularly in the price-sensitive low end of the midmarket.”
And Stifel Nicolaus analyst Aaron Rakers noted that, going forward, EMC could face increasing competition at the high end (Symmetrix) of the market, particularly from Hitachi (Virtual Storage Platform), IBM (refreshed DS8000) and from 3PAR now that HP owns that company.
Other than those potential future challenges, everything’s coming up roses for EMC.
The company set records across the board in Q410 and for the full year. Fourth quarter revenue was $4.9 billion, up 19% over Q409. GAAP net income increased 61% year-over-year to $628.6 million. GAAP diluted earnings per share were up 53%. EMC closed the quarter with $9.5 billion in cash and investments.
For the full year (2010), EMC’s revenue was $17 billion, an increase of 21% over 2009 revenue. GAAP net income increased a whopping 75% to $1.9 billion, and diluted earnings per share were up 66%.
EMC executives expect 2011 revenue to be in the $19.6 billion range.
Diving a little deeper into EMC’s fourth quarter numbers: Symmetrix revenue increased 19% vs. Q4 2009, and revenue from the company’s mid-tier lineup (Clariion, Celerra, Centera, Data Domain, etc.) was up 23%. Revenue from majority-owned VMware was up 38%.
Looking ahead, I’m sure EMC will get a nice boost when the Isilon product line ramps, and I also expect very positive results from the recently introduced VNX/VNXe unified storage product line. And with the large amount of cash on hand, expect EMC to make some more acquisitions this year, most likely in the cloud and virtualization spaces.
Related article:
EMC announces 41 new products
Friday, January 21, 2011
Book Review: "Data Center Storage"
I recently read an advance copy of a book that’s due to be published in mid-February. I know and respect the author, and it’s rare that we get entire books on our favorite subject, so I was anxious to read it. It’s called Data Center Storage: Cost-Effective Strategies, Implementation and Management, by Hubbert Smith (see bio at the end of this post).
This book makes the case that IT organizations spend too much on storage, examines why, and provides practical advice on how to correct that situation.
According to Hubbert, the root causes of over-spending include using direct-attached server storage instead of consolidated storage; using old school performance-optimized designs rather than capacity-optimized storage; relying on single-tier storage rather than tiered storage; backing up to tape in situations where snapshots should be used; and not employing tiered storage SLAs. And, of course, over-spending on storage will accelerate as volumes of incoming data ramp up.
After examining the root causes behind over-spending on storage, Data Center Storage then provides solutions to “deliver more while spending less.”
The author sets out to separate the signal from the noise surrounding data center storage through use cases and coverage of key issues in storage performance, capacity, power and cost. The examples are usually supported with simple “financial scenario A vs. financial scenario B” cost analysis, including hardware, maintenance and operational (people) costs. The book goes deep enough into the technologies to offer IT-business-level understanding and recommends specific improvements for IT managers.
Data Center Storage then covers the building blocks of storage, including hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid-state disk (SSD) drives, in business terms such as IOPS/$ and GB/$, leading the reader to an understanding of the tradeoffs between storage capacity, performance and costs. Data center power is covered to an adequate depth to improve IT-business-level understanding, and at the end of every section the book offers recommendations for improvements -- in the context of financial scenarios -- to assist in the justification of spending on improvements.
Storage consolidation and data protection are also covered and, consistent with other sections in the book, improvements are provided with financial comparison templates.
The next sections of the book build on the storage consolidation theme, introducing storage tiering and tiering-specific Service Level Agreements (SLAs) covering performance, capacity, up-time, growth, RPO/RTO and price. All of this is in support of the book’s central theme: delivery of service levels and fiscal responsibility.
Data Center Storage de-mystifies new, and not-so-new, technologies such as virtualization, replication, snapshots, thin provisioning, and unified storage (SAN/NAS). The book provides insight into where these technologies have a payoff and where they have limited payoff.
The final sections of the book build on storage consolidation, tiering, reliability and SLA approaches to guide your organization in taking advantage of managed hosting and cloud services, including project planning and service provider vetting and SLAs, all of which is supported with the “financial scenario A vs. financial scenario B” concept.
Data Center Storage closes with insights into roadmap creation, project management and financial justification drawn from the author’s experience in technology company processes, which are equally applicable to IT.
This book is not for readers looking for a technology-only book -- those that exhaustively describe the inner workings of all the various RAID levels and the intricacies of Fibre Channel zoning and similar technical deep-dive topics.
This book is for IT storage professionals who manage storage systems, especially those lobbying for storage improvements to meet “spend less and deliver more” directives. Data Center Storage improves the possibility of fruitful interactions with the folks that control the budget and spending on storage.
I’d also recommend the book for IT business professionals that are tired of the marketing noise and weary of hearing about all the solutions in search of problems. The book provides a business-level understanding of storage use cases and associated costs, and should lead to more informed spending decisions.
Most storage books cover technology, and not business, issues. In contrast, Data Center Storage offers a unique and useful approach to business-meets-storage-technology. And, as the fundamental components of data center storage (performance, capacity, reliability/up-time, power and price) do not change significantly over time, this book could be an often-referenced source for any IT department -- small, medium or large.
For more info or to place an advance order, visit the Data Center Storage page on Amazon.com.
And here’s a little background on the author:
Hubbert Smith contributed to early versions of several disruptive technologies, including network-attached storage (NAS), server fail-over and storage replication. He also pioneered the creation and development of a new product category -- capacity optimized enterprise disk drives (aka Raid Edition) – which is used in enterprise storage and surveillance systems. Capacity-optimized drives now make up roughly one-third of all enterprise-class disk drives.
Smith contributed to the development of Serial ATA (SATA) industry standards, specifically those that enabled SATA to be used in enterprise storage systems. He is a patent holder and a published author (Serial ATA Architectures and Applications - Intel Press).
He holds a BS degree in Electrical Engineering from Auburn University and is currently Director of Product Management at LSI.
This book makes the case that IT organizations spend too much on storage, examines why, and provides practical advice on how to correct that situation.
According to Hubbert, the root causes of over-spending include using direct-attached server storage instead of consolidated storage; using old school performance-optimized designs rather than capacity-optimized storage; relying on single-tier storage rather than tiered storage; backing up to tape in situations where snapshots should be used; and not employing tiered storage SLAs. And, of course, over-spending on storage will accelerate as volumes of incoming data ramp up.
After examining the root causes behind over-spending on storage, Data Center Storage then provides solutions to “deliver more while spending less.”
The author sets out to separate the signal from the noise surrounding data center storage through use cases and coverage of key issues in storage performance, capacity, power and cost. The examples are usually supported with simple “financial scenario A vs. financial scenario B” cost analysis, including hardware, maintenance and operational (people) costs. The book goes deep enough into the technologies to offer IT-business-level understanding and recommends specific improvements for IT managers.
Data Center Storage then covers the building blocks of storage, including hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid-state disk (SSD) drives, in business terms such as IOPS/$ and GB/$, leading the reader to an understanding of the tradeoffs between storage capacity, performance and costs. Data center power is covered to an adequate depth to improve IT-business-level understanding, and at the end of every section the book offers recommendations for improvements -- in the context of financial scenarios -- to assist in the justification of spending on improvements.
Storage consolidation and data protection are also covered and, consistent with other sections in the book, improvements are provided with financial comparison templates.
The next sections of the book build on the storage consolidation theme, introducing storage tiering and tiering-specific Service Level Agreements (SLAs) covering performance, capacity, up-time, growth, RPO/RTO and price. All of this is in support of the book’s central theme: delivery of service levels and fiscal responsibility.
Data Center Storage de-mystifies new, and not-so-new, technologies such as virtualization, replication, snapshots, thin provisioning, and unified storage (SAN/NAS). The book provides insight into where these technologies have a payoff and where they have limited payoff.
The final sections of the book build on storage consolidation, tiering, reliability and SLA approaches to guide your organization in taking advantage of managed hosting and cloud services, including project planning and service provider vetting and SLAs, all of which is supported with the “financial scenario A vs. financial scenario B” concept.
Data Center Storage closes with insights into roadmap creation, project management and financial justification drawn from the author’s experience in technology company processes, which are equally applicable to IT.
This book is not for readers looking for a technology-only book -- those that exhaustively describe the inner workings of all the various RAID levels and the intricacies of Fibre Channel zoning and similar technical deep-dive topics.
This book is for IT storage professionals who manage storage systems, especially those lobbying for storage improvements to meet “spend less and deliver more” directives. Data Center Storage improves the possibility of fruitful interactions with the folks that control the budget and spending on storage.
I’d also recommend the book for IT business professionals that are tired of the marketing noise and weary of hearing about all the solutions in search of problems. The book provides a business-level understanding of storage use cases and associated costs, and should lead to more informed spending decisions.
Most storage books cover technology, and not business, issues. In contrast, Data Center Storage offers a unique and useful approach to business-meets-storage-technology. And, as the fundamental components of data center storage (performance, capacity, reliability/up-time, power and price) do not change significantly over time, this book could be an often-referenced source for any IT department -- small, medium or large.
For more info or to place an advance order, visit the Data Center Storage page on Amazon.com.
And here’s a little background on the author:
Hubbert Smith contributed to early versions of several disruptive technologies, including network-attached storage (NAS), server fail-over and storage replication. He also pioneered the creation and development of a new product category -- capacity optimized enterprise disk drives (aka Raid Edition) – which is used in enterprise storage and surveillance systems. Capacity-optimized drives now make up roughly one-third of all enterprise-class disk drives.
Smith contributed to the development of Serial ATA (SATA) industry standards, specifically those that enabled SATA to be used in enterprise storage systems. He is a patent holder and a published author (Serial ATA Architectures and Applications - Intel Press).
He holds a BS degree in Electrical Engineering from Auburn University and is currently Director of Product Management at LSI.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
EMC + Dell: It’s not Ozzie and Harriet anymore
January 19, 2011 -- It’s not news that the fissure is getting deeper, and wider, in the once rock-solid reseller relationship between EMC and Dell. And the fissure started looking more like a crevasse this week as the relationship became icy when EMC introduced the VNX and VNXe (entry level) line of unified storage systems as part of a massive rollout of new products (see “EMC announces 41 new products” ).
EMC chairman, CEO and president Joe Tucci made a number of interesting remarks this week, but I think the most strident was in a CRN article where he was quoted as saying: “In this product line [the VNXe] there is no Dell partnership. In any conversations we have had with Dell, Dell will not take up this partnership. They will not resell this product.” (See Joe Kovar’s article on CRN: “EMC’s Tucci: No Dell Partnership With VNX/VNXe.”)
Tucci went on to say: “Obviously some channel partners – maybe all channel partners – would see Dell as a competitor. Here we are saying ‘Don’t worry about it – Dell is not getting this product.’ It sounds like I’m saying ‘You can’t have it, Dell’ [but] basically, it doesn’t fit their strategy. It doesn’t fit our strategy.”
But it’s important to note that those comments related to the low-end VNXe (which has a starting price of less than $10,000), not the VNX line.
Here’s what Dell has to say, courtesy Dell spokesperson David Graves: “Dell is selling VNX through our reseller agreement. A Dell-branded OEM version of VNX is still in discussion. Dell and EMC have mutually agreed not to use Dell as a channel for the VNXe product – either as a reseller or a Dell-branded OEM offering.”
So Dell will not resell the VNXe but will – at least for now – resell the VNX as an EMC-branded product with the (unlikely) possibility of reselling it with the Dell-EMC brand.
A little (probably unnecessary for InfoStor readers) history: The EMC-Dell relationship began 10 years ago and was for some time a wildly successful win-win. The fissure in the relationship probably started to appear when Dell acquired EqualLogic, which put Dell on the storage map. (In its last reporting period, Dell stated that revenue from the EqualLogic line grew 66% over the previous year.)
The fissure widened when Dell made a bid for 3PAR (eventually losing a bidding war with HP) and started looking like a chasm when Dell said it would acquire Compellent, which is still in progress.
The decision (by EMC or Dell or both?) for Dell to not resell the VNXe is a real boon to EMC’s resellers, which otherwise would have had to compete with Dell. But the two companies should do the entire channel a favor and just sever the relationship and move on.
Related articles:
EMC announces 41 new products (InfoStor)
EMC’s Tucci: No Dell Partnership With VNX/VNXe (CRN)
EMC chairman, CEO and president Joe Tucci made a number of interesting remarks this week, but I think the most strident was in a CRN article where he was quoted as saying: “In this product line [the VNXe] there is no Dell partnership. In any conversations we have had with Dell, Dell will not take up this partnership. They will not resell this product.” (See Joe Kovar’s article on CRN: “EMC’s Tucci: No Dell Partnership With VNX/VNXe.”)
Tucci went on to say: “Obviously some channel partners – maybe all channel partners – would see Dell as a competitor. Here we are saying ‘Don’t worry about it – Dell is not getting this product.’ It sounds like I’m saying ‘You can’t have it, Dell’ [but] basically, it doesn’t fit their strategy. It doesn’t fit our strategy.”
But it’s important to note that those comments related to the low-end VNXe (which has a starting price of less than $10,000), not the VNX line.
Here’s what Dell has to say, courtesy Dell spokesperson David Graves: “Dell is selling VNX through our reseller agreement. A Dell-branded OEM version of VNX is still in discussion. Dell and EMC have mutually agreed not to use Dell as a channel for the VNXe product – either as a reseller or a Dell-branded OEM offering.”
So Dell will not resell the VNXe but will – at least for now – resell the VNX as an EMC-branded product with the (unlikely) possibility of reselling it with the Dell-EMC brand.
A little (probably unnecessary for InfoStor readers) history: The EMC-Dell relationship began 10 years ago and was for some time a wildly successful win-win. The fissure in the relationship probably started to appear when Dell acquired EqualLogic, which put Dell on the storage map. (In its last reporting period, Dell stated that revenue from the EqualLogic line grew 66% over the previous year.)
The fissure widened when Dell made a bid for 3PAR (eventually losing a bidding war with HP) and started looking like a chasm when Dell said it would acquire Compellent, which is still in progress.
The decision (by EMC or Dell or both?) for Dell to not resell the VNXe is a real boon to EMC’s resellers, which otherwise would have had to compete with Dell. But the two companies should do the entire channel a favor and just sever the relationship and move on.
Related articles:
EMC announces 41 new products (InfoStor)
EMC’s Tucci: No Dell Partnership With VNX/VNXe (CRN)
Monday, January 10, 2011
Top Five Storage Technologies for 2011
January 10, 2011 – Any top technologies list is somewhat (totally?) arbitrary. Do you pick them based on how interesting the technologies are? How much end-user interest is behind them? The extent to which the technologies will benefit end users? How much revenue they’ll generate? Or all of the above? Let’s go with “all of the above.”
Here’s my list of some of the key storage technologies for this year (in no particular order), with links to related in-depth features and recent product news articles from InfoStor and our partner site Enterprise Storage Forum.
#1. Solid-state disk (SSD) drives
2011 will finally be The Year of SSDs. All of the major disk array vendors now offer SSDs (mostly from STEC, although competition will heat up significantly this year). Prices are declining rapidly as volumes increase and technology improves. Some vendors are positioning relatively inexpensive multi-level cell (MLC), as opposed to single-level cell (SLC), NAND flash for enterprise duty. SSD and controller vendors have solved most of the issues around reliability and endurance which, together with the price declines, eliminate the primary gating factors to end-user adoption of SSDs.
Market researcher IDC predicts that the total SSD market will grow at a 58% CAGR in unit shipments and a 44% CAGR in revenues over the next few years.
The fastest growing segment of the overall market is enterprise-class SSDs, where unit shipment are expected to surge at a CAGR of 74%, and revenues are expected to grow at a 54% clip, through 2014.
IDC expects the total SSD market to exceed $7 billion in 2014.
Related articles:
Why solid state drives won’t replace spinning disk (Enterprise Storage Forum)
Fixing SSD performance degradation, part 1 (Enterprise Storage Forum)
Fixing SSD performance degradation, part 2 (Enterprise Storage Forum)
SSDs hit mainstream stride
Intel ships miniature SSDs
SSD update: Toshiba, OCZ
Hitachi GST enters SSD market
STEC scores OEM win with IBM for MLC SSDs
LSI ships SSD-based accelerator card
#2. Data reduction (data deduplication and/or compression) for primary storage
Just like data deduplication for secondary storage swept the market and became mainstream over the last couple years, data reduction for primary storage will gain traction in end-user adoption over the next two years.
Interest in data reduction for primary storage picked up significantly last year due in large part to a number of factors, including NetApp’s evangelizing the technology, IBM’s acquisition of Storwize, Dell’s acquisition of Ocarina, and the entry of startups such as BridgeSTOR.
Related articles:
IBM to buy Storwize for real-time data compression (Enterprise Storage Forum)
Dell to acquire Ocarina for data deduplication
Startup BridgeSTOR enters data reduction market
Musings on the future of data dedupe (blog post)
Data deduplication: Permabit finds success with OEM model (blog post)
#3. Cloud storage
A few years after the term ‘cloud storage’ was introduced, vendors and users are still debating what it is. Let’s just call it storage-as-a-service, whether internal (private) or external (public, or hosted). There were probably more product/service announcements regarding cloud storage last year than any other technology. And there’s little doubt that will continue in 2011.
Related articles:
SNIA forms Cloud Backup and Recovery SIG
SNIA develops standards for cloud storage
SNIA completes cloud storage standard
Guidelines for implementing cloud storage
EMC debuts self-service platform for cloud storage
F5 ARX appliances integrate with cloud storage
#4. Data center convergence
Data center convergence can be viewed as the unification of storage, servers and networks, or, as the convergence of networks. In the context of the latter, we’ll see increased end-user interest in Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) in 2011, which was stalled over the last year due in part to the slump in IT spending. But as the IT world moves to 10GbE, the old FCoE-vs.-iSCSI debate will be renewed this year (with a lot of the debate centered on performance and cost issues).
I also expect a lot of controversy over the various approaches to converged (10GbE/FC/iSCSI) adapters, which are usually referred to as converged network adapters (CNAs). Expect a battle royale between vendors such as Emulex, QLogic, Intel, Broadcom and others.
Related articles:
Guidelines for FCoE deployment
FCoE I/O convergence and virtualization
Brocade moves FCoE beyond top-of-rack (Enterprise Storage Forum)
Broadcom claims 2 million+ IOPS on converged controller (blog post)
Intel’s card play in unified networking (10GbE+iSCSI+FCoE)
#5. Storage solutions for virtual servers and desktops
There has been a lot of innovation from storage vendors as well as virtual server platform vendors over the last few years in the area of optimizing storage for virtual server environments, particularly in disk arrays and backup/recovery software. But this year, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) deployments will take off, and just as virtual servers created a lot of storage challenges, so will VDI.
According to a Client Virtualization Straw Poll conducted by CDW, which surveyed 200 IT managers, 91% of the respondents plan to implement some form of client virtualization within the next 12 to 24 months. The primary drivers behind adoption of client virtualization are improved operational efficiency and reduced costs (expected savings were estimated at 20% of the IT budget, according to early adopters).
Related articles:
Storage considerations for VDI implementations
Seven steps to a successful VDI implementation
FalconStor adds VDI support to SAN Accelerator
Related blog post: The Top Ten storage acquisitions of 2010
Here’s my list of some of the key storage technologies for this year (in no particular order), with links to related in-depth features and recent product news articles from InfoStor and our partner site Enterprise Storage Forum.
#1. Solid-state disk (SSD) drives
2011 will finally be The Year of SSDs. All of the major disk array vendors now offer SSDs (mostly from STEC, although competition will heat up significantly this year). Prices are declining rapidly as volumes increase and technology improves. Some vendors are positioning relatively inexpensive multi-level cell (MLC), as opposed to single-level cell (SLC), NAND flash for enterprise duty. SSD and controller vendors have solved most of the issues around reliability and endurance which, together with the price declines, eliminate the primary gating factors to end-user adoption of SSDs.
Market researcher IDC predicts that the total SSD market will grow at a 58% CAGR in unit shipments and a 44% CAGR in revenues over the next few years.
The fastest growing segment of the overall market is enterprise-class SSDs, where unit shipment are expected to surge at a CAGR of 74%, and revenues are expected to grow at a 54% clip, through 2014.
IDC expects the total SSD market to exceed $7 billion in 2014.
Related articles:
Why solid state drives won’t replace spinning disk (Enterprise Storage Forum)
Fixing SSD performance degradation, part 1 (Enterprise Storage Forum)
Fixing SSD performance degradation, part 2 (Enterprise Storage Forum)
SSDs hit mainstream stride
Intel ships miniature SSDs
SSD update: Toshiba, OCZ
Hitachi GST enters SSD market
STEC scores OEM win with IBM for MLC SSDs
LSI ships SSD-based accelerator card
#2. Data reduction (data deduplication and/or compression) for primary storage
Just like data deduplication for secondary storage swept the market and became mainstream over the last couple years, data reduction for primary storage will gain traction in end-user adoption over the next two years.
Interest in data reduction for primary storage picked up significantly last year due in large part to a number of factors, including NetApp’s evangelizing the technology, IBM’s acquisition of Storwize, Dell’s acquisition of Ocarina, and the entry of startups such as BridgeSTOR.
Related articles:
IBM to buy Storwize for real-time data compression (Enterprise Storage Forum)
Dell to acquire Ocarina for data deduplication
Startup BridgeSTOR enters data reduction market
Musings on the future of data dedupe (blog post)
Data deduplication: Permabit finds success with OEM model (blog post)
#3. Cloud storage
A few years after the term ‘cloud storage’ was introduced, vendors and users are still debating what it is. Let’s just call it storage-as-a-service, whether internal (private) or external (public, or hosted). There were probably more product/service announcements regarding cloud storage last year than any other technology. And there’s little doubt that will continue in 2011.
Related articles:
SNIA forms Cloud Backup and Recovery SIG
SNIA develops standards for cloud storage
SNIA completes cloud storage standard
Guidelines for implementing cloud storage
EMC debuts self-service platform for cloud storage
F5 ARX appliances integrate with cloud storage
#4. Data center convergence
Data center convergence can be viewed as the unification of storage, servers and networks, or, as the convergence of networks. In the context of the latter, we’ll see increased end-user interest in Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) in 2011, which was stalled over the last year due in part to the slump in IT spending. But as the IT world moves to 10GbE, the old FCoE-vs.-iSCSI debate will be renewed this year (with a lot of the debate centered on performance and cost issues).
I also expect a lot of controversy over the various approaches to converged (10GbE/FC/iSCSI) adapters, which are usually referred to as converged network adapters (CNAs). Expect a battle royale between vendors such as Emulex, QLogic, Intel, Broadcom and others.
Related articles:
Guidelines for FCoE deployment
FCoE I/O convergence and virtualization
Brocade moves FCoE beyond top-of-rack (Enterprise Storage Forum)
Broadcom claims 2 million+ IOPS on converged controller (blog post)
Intel’s card play in unified networking (10GbE+iSCSI+FCoE)
#5. Storage solutions for virtual servers and desktops
There has been a lot of innovation from storage vendors as well as virtual server platform vendors over the last few years in the area of optimizing storage for virtual server environments, particularly in disk arrays and backup/recovery software. But this year, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) deployments will take off, and just as virtual servers created a lot of storage challenges, so will VDI.
According to a Client Virtualization Straw Poll conducted by CDW, which surveyed 200 IT managers, 91% of the respondents plan to implement some form of client virtualization within the next 12 to 24 months. The primary drivers behind adoption of client virtualization are improved operational efficiency and reduced costs (expected savings were estimated at 20% of the IT budget, according to early adopters).
Related articles:
Storage considerations for VDI implementations
Seven steps to a successful VDI implementation
FalconStor adds VDI support to SAN Accelerator
Related blog post: The Top Ten storage acquisitions of 2010
Sunday, January 2, 2011
The Top Ten Storage Acquisitions of 2010
January 3, 2011 -- I originally posted a Top Ten acquisitions list in September, under the assumption that after the blockbuster HP-3PAR buyout we may have seen the last of the big storage acquisitions for the year. Wrong. The storage industry capped a crazy year of M&A fever with the EMC-Isilon and Dell-Compellent acquisitions. With those additions, I had to knock off from the list a few of the relatively minor acquisitions of the year, including SolarWinds’ acquisition of Tek-Tools and Exar’s buyout of Neterion.
Here's my revised list of the Top 10 storage acquisitions of 2010, in ascending order:
#10: PMC-SIERRA – ADAPTEC
Throughout the 1990s, Adaptec was synonymous with SCSI, and had a lock on the SCSI controller/adapter market. The company reached its heyday when it racked up revenues of about $800 million in fiscal 2000. But Adaptec didn’t see the winds of change blowing.
PMC-Sierra acquired Adaptec this summer for a mere $34 million.
In addition to Adaptec’s technology and products, PMC acquired Adaptec’s extensive channel, where it is still strong in RAID adapters.
PMC-Sierra’s acquisition of Adaptec puts the company in even more intense competition with arch enemy LSI. Now PMC will compete in the channel with LSI at the board level, whereas previously the battle was fought primarily on the semiconductor front.
Related articles:
PMC-Sierra to buy Adaptec’s channel storage business
PMC-Sierra ships 6Gbps SAS controllers
#9: NETAPP – BYCAST
The terms of the NetApp-Bycast deal were not disclosed. According to our original article on the acquisition: “NetApp is advancing its efforts in the cloud storage market with the acquisition of Bycast, a developer of object-based storage virtualization software that turns multiple storage devices across geographically-dispersed locations into a single pool for storing fixed content data.”
See “NetApp to acquire Bycast for cloud storage software”
NetApp plans to leverage Bycast technology to go after markets such as digital media, Web 2.0, healthcare, and cloud services providers.
Bycast’s flagship product is its StorageGRID virtualization software. It will be interesting to see what happens to some of Bycast’s existing OEM deals, which include partnerships with IBM and HP.
#8: EMULEX – SERVERENGINES
Prior to acquiring ServerEngines, Emulex was in a dicey position: The company licensed critical technology, including 10GbE ASICs, from ServerEngines and that technology was key to Emulex’s (at the time) risky gamble of betting the farm on 10GbE (and going head-to-head with Ethernet giants Broadcom and Intel, in addition to long-time rival QLogic and others).
The position was dicey because a competitor could scoop up ServerEngines, thus pulling the rug from underneath Emulex’s strategy. Emulex paid a high price for ServerEngines, but there wasn’t any choice.
According to our original article on the acquisition: “Emulex will acquire ServerEngines for $78 million in cash and eight million shares of Emulex stock. Based on Emulex’s closing price of $10.11 last week, those eight million shares would translate into an additional $81 million, bringing the total to almost $160 million.”
But wait, there’s more: “In addition, Emulex will issue four million shares of stock if ServerEngines meets certain business objectives by the end of 2011. Emulex also agreed to assume ServerEngines’ debt, which is currently $25 million. As such, the deal could eventually exceed $200 million.”
See “Emulex to acquire ServerEngines”
The bet, and the acquisition, seem to have paid off. Emulex has racked up a number of OEM design wins for its 10GbE/FCoE/iSCSI converged network adapters (CNAs), including Dell, EMC, HDS, HP, IBM and NetApp.
ServerEngines was founded in 2004 by former Broadcom engineers that were previously with ServerWorks, which was acquired by Broadcom in 2001. In early 2009, Broadcom launched an unsuccessful hostile takeover of Emulex.
#7: DELL – OCARINA
Rumored to be in the $150 million ballpark, Dell’s acquisition of Ocarina came as a surprise to almost everybody, and (along with #6, see below) confirmed that capacity optimization (data deduplication and/or compression) of primary storage is The Next Big Thing.
According to my original blog post on this acquisition (see “Dell to acquire Ocarina for data deduplication”): “Until the announcement of its embeddable, OEM version of its software, Ocarina was known primarily as a vendor of data reduction technology for primary storage. But the embeddable version is applicable across the storage spectrum, from primary storage to backup and archive.”
I think Dell will initially leverage Ocarina’s technology in image-intensive, fixed-content applications on primary storage. That space is where, so far, Ocarina has made its mark, with large wins at companies such as Kodak. Dell will probably continue to resell Symantec, CommVault and Data Domain software where those companies’ technologies make more sense, or where customers demand it.
And in a related Top 10 acquisition . . .
#6: IBM – STORWIZE
This one had been rumored for weeks before IBM made it official, so it ranks low on the surprise factor but high on the industry influence scale. Even more than the Dell-Ocarina deal, and even more than NetApp’s evangelizing, IBM’s acquisition of data compression specialist Storwize put data reduction for primary storage in a top spot among Hot Storage Technologies.
Rumors put this deal in the range of $140 million.
Storwize’s data reduction technology differs from some of its competitors in that it is in-line, real-time compression, as opposed to data deduplication.
It’s certainly not an understatement to say that being acquired by IBM was the smartest thing Storwize did since changing its name from Storwiz.
The Storwize product line is now part of the IBM Real-time Compression business unit.
See “IBM to Buy Storwize for Real-Time Data Compression” on InfoStor partner site Enterprise Storage Forum.
#5: VISION SOLUTIONS – DOUBLE-TAKE
This one ranked high on the surprise factor and it also ranked high in dollars, being valued at $242 million.
That amounted to about $10.55 per Double-Take share. Double-Take went public in 2006 at about $11 a share.
Prior to the Vision Solutions announcement, it was well known that Double-Take was on the block, with vendors such as Dell and HP considered to be potential acquirers.
Vision Solutions specializes in data protection software for IBM systems, while Double-Take’s strengths are in backup, replication, disaster recovery and high availability software, primarily for Microsoft platforms.
See “Vision Solutions to acquire Double-Take”
#4: EMC – GREENPLUM
I never did find out exactly what EMC paid for Greenplum, a data warehousing and analytics specialist, but my (questionable) sources tell me that the acquisition payment would easily put the deal near the top of this list.
Greenplum claims more than 100 customers, including NASDAQ OMX, NYSE Euronext, Skype, Equifax and T-Mobile.
In addition to its massively parallel processing (MPP) Greenplum Database, the company has Greenplum Chorus, a cloud platform for collaboration and data sharing. Greenplum became the foundation of a new division within EMC’s Information Infrastructure business.
Greenplum is a nice fit with EMC’s cloud initiatives, but it also heats up the competition between EMC, Oracle, IBM and Sun.
See “EMC acquires data warehousing vendor Greenplum”
#3: DELL – COMPELLENT
This one may not be a done deal, but it’s pretty close so Dell’s “take-under” acquisition of Compellent takes the #3 spot on our list. The latest offer is $27.75 per share, which translates into about $960 million, or $820 million net of Compellent’s cash.
In a sense, Compellent is a consolation prize after Dell lost the bidding war with HP over 3PAR. Acquiring 3PAR would have solidified Dell’s position in high-end disk arrays, but Compellent fills out Dell’s mid-range (and slightly high-end) positioning.
It will be interesting to see how Dell positions Compellent’s disk arrays relative to the EqualLogic product line (which grew 66% in revenues over the last year), but it will be even more interesting to see what happens to Dell’s EMC reseller agreement.
#2: EMC – ISILON
EMC shelled out around $2.25 billion for scale-out NAS vendor Isilon Systems, net of Isilon’s existing cash balance. That’s an eye-popping amount of cash, particularly considering that Isilon was barely profitable, but market researcher IDC predicts that the scale-out NAS market will grow on average about 36% annually, reaching an estimated $6 billion in 2014.
According to EMC’s press release on the announcement: “EMC’s Atmos and Isilon’s solutions will offer customers a highly scalable, low-cost storage infrastructure for managing ‘Big Data’ . . . EMC Atmos object storage provides the perfect complement to Isilon for massive globally distributed environments and object access to data for usages like Web 2.0 applications.”
EMC officials estimate that the combined revenue from the Isilon and Atmos platforms will hit a $1 billion run rate during the second half of 2012. EMC also emphasized synergies between Isilon’s clustered scale-out NAS platforms and systems/software from Greenplum.
Isilon wasn’t EMC’s only acquisition this year. The company bought Bus-Tech about a week prior to the Isilon announcement. Bus-Tech specializes in VTL technology for mainframe environments. The financial terms of the Bus-Tech acquisition were not disclosed.
See “EMC snaps up Isilon for $2.25 billion” on InfoStor partner site Enterprise Storage Forum.
#1: HP – 3PAR
By virtue of its price ($2.4 billion) and the drama of the bidding war with Dell (which started at $1.15 billion), HP’s acquisition of 3PAR was clearly the #1 storage acquisition of 2010.
The acquisition of 3PAR puts HP in a much better competitive position, but it will be interesting to see what happens to the rest of HP’s disk array lineup. Does the 3PAR acquisition sound the death knell for the venerable EVA line? And what will be the fate of HP’s reseller deal with Hitachi? Months after the acquisition was announced, we still have more questions than answers on this acquisition.
2010 wasn’t a record-setting year in terms of the number of storage acquisitions, but it certainly was a record setter in terms of the amount of money that was shelled out.
As we enter 2011, the big question is: Who will be acquired next? According to the financial analyst community, CommVault is the most likely storage vendor to be acquired, but other possibilities cited by financial analysts include (in no particular order) Xiotech, Brocade, BlueArc, FalconStor and NetApp.
Related article:
Top 10 Storage Predictions for 2011 (by Henry Newman, on Enterprise Storage Forum)
Here's my revised list of the Top 10 storage acquisitions of 2010, in ascending order:
#10: PMC-SIERRA – ADAPTEC
Throughout the 1990s, Adaptec was synonymous with SCSI, and had a lock on the SCSI controller/adapter market. The company reached its heyday when it racked up revenues of about $800 million in fiscal 2000. But Adaptec didn’t see the winds of change blowing.
PMC-Sierra acquired Adaptec this summer for a mere $34 million.
In addition to Adaptec’s technology and products, PMC acquired Adaptec’s extensive channel, where it is still strong in RAID adapters.
PMC-Sierra’s acquisition of Adaptec puts the company in even more intense competition with arch enemy LSI. Now PMC will compete in the channel with LSI at the board level, whereas previously the battle was fought primarily on the semiconductor front.
Related articles:
PMC-Sierra to buy Adaptec’s channel storage business
PMC-Sierra ships 6Gbps SAS controllers
#9: NETAPP – BYCAST
The terms of the NetApp-Bycast deal were not disclosed. According to our original article on the acquisition: “NetApp is advancing its efforts in the cloud storage market with the acquisition of Bycast, a developer of object-based storage virtualization software that turns multiple storage devices across geographically-dispersed locations into a single pool for storing fixed content data.”
See “NetApp to acquire Bycast for cloud storage software”
NetApp plans to leverage Bycast technology to go after markets such as digital media, Web 2.0, healthcare, and cloud services providers.
Bycast’s flagship product is its StorageGRID virtualization software. It will be interesting to see what happens to some of Bycast’s existing OEM deals, which include partnerships with IBM and HP.
#8: EMULEX – SERVERENGINES
Prior to acquiring ServerEngines, Emulex was in a dicey position: The company licensed critical technology, including 10GbE ASICs, from ServerEngines and that technology was key to Emulex’s (at the time) risky gamble of betting the farm on 10GbE (and going head-to-head with Ethernet giants Broadcom and Intel, in addition to long-time rival QLogic and others).
The position was dicey because a competitor could scoop up ServerEngines, thus pulling the rug from underneath Emulex’s strategy. Emulex paid a high price for ServerEngines, but there wasn’t any choice.
According to our original article on the acquisition: “Emulex will acquire ServerEngines for $78 million in cash and eight million shares of Emulex stock. Based on Emulex’s closing price of $10.11 last week, those eight million shares would translate into an additional $81 million, bringing the total to almost $160 million.”
But wait, there’s more: “In addition, Emulex will issue four million shares of stock if ServerEngines meets certain business objectives by the end of 2011. Emulex also agreed to assume ServerEngines’ debt, which is currently $25 million. As such, the deal could eventually exceed $200 million.”
See “Emulex to acquire ServerEngines”
The bet, and the acquisition, seem to have paid off. Emulex has racked up a number of OEM design wins for its 10GbE/FCoE/iSCSI converged network adapters (CNAs), including Dell, EMC, HDS, HP, IBM and NetApp.
ServerEngines was founded in 2004 by former Broadcom engineers that were previously with ServerWorks, which was acquired by Broadcom in 2001. In early 2009, Broadcom launched an unsuccessful hostile takeover of Emulex.
#7: DELL – OCARINA
Rumored to be in the $150 million ballpark, Dell’s acquisition of Ocarina came as a surprise to almost everybody, and (along with #6, see below) confirmed that capacity optimization (data deduplication and/or compression) of primary storage is The Next Big Thing.
According to my original blog post on this acquisition (see “Dell to acquire Ocarina for data deduplication”): “Until the announcement of its embeddable, OEM version of its software, Ocarina was known primarily as a vendor of data reduction technology for primary storage. But the embeddable version is applicable across the storage spectrum, from primary storage to backup and archive.”
I think Dell will initially leverage Ocarina’s technology in image-intensive, fixed-content applications on primary storage. That space is where, so far, Ocarina has made its mark, with large wins at companies such as Kodak. Dell will probably continue to resell Symantec, CommVault and Data Domain software where those companies’ technologies make more sense, or where customers demand it.
And in a related Top 10 acquisition . . .
#6: IBM – STORWIZE
This one had been rumored for weeks before IBM made it official, so it ranks low on the surprise factor but high on the industry influence scale. Even more than the Dell-Ocarina deal, and even more than NetApp’s evangelizing, IBM’s acquisition of data compression specialist Storwize put data reduction for primary storage in a top spot among Hot Storage Technologies.
Rumors put this deal in the range of $140 million.
Storwize’s data reduction technology differs from some of its competitors in that it is in-line, real-time compression, as opposed to data deduplication.
It’s certainly not an understatement to say that being acquired by IBM was the smartest thing Storwize did since changing its name from Storwiz.
The Storwize product line is now part of the IBM Real-time Compression business unit.
See “IBM to Buy Storwize for Real-Time Data Compression” on InfoStor partner site Enterprise Storage Forum.
#5: VISION SOLUTIONS – DOUBLE-TAKE
This one ranked high on the surprise factor and it also ranked high in dollars, being valued at $242 million.
That amounted to about $10.55 per Double-Take share. Double-Take went public in 2006 at about $11 a share.
Prior to the Vision Solutions announcement, it was well known that Double-Take was on the block, with vendors such as Dell and HP considered to be potential acquirers.
Vision Solutions specializes in data protection software for IBM systems, while Double-Take’s strengths are in backup, replication, disaster recovery and high availability software, primarily for Microsoft platforms.
See “Vision Solutions to acquire Double-Take”
#4: EMC – GREENPLUM
I never did find out exactly what EMC paid for Greenplum, a data warehousing and analytics specialist, but my (questionable) sources tell me that the acquisition payment would easily put the deal near the top of this list.
Greenplum claims more than 100 customers, including NASDAQ OMX, NYSE Euronext, Skype, Equifax and T-Mobile.
In addition to its massively parallel processing (MPP) Greenplum Database, the company has Greenplum Chorus, a cloud platform for collaboration and data sharing. Greenplum became the foundation of a new division within EMC’s Information Infrastructure business.
Greenplum is a nice fit with EMC’s cloud initiatives, but it also heats up the competition between EMC, Oracle, IBM and Sun.
See “EMC acquires data warehousing vendor Greenplum”
#3: DELL – COMPELLENT
This one may not be a done deal, but it’s pretty close so Dell’s “take-under” acquisition of Compellent takes the #3 spot on our list. The latest offer is $27.75 per share, which translates into about $960 million, or $820 million net of Compellent’s cash.
In a sense, Compellent is a consolation prize after Dell lost the bidding war with HP over 3PAR. Acquiring 3PAR would have solidified Dell’s position in high-end disk arrays, but Compellent fills out Dell’s mid-range (and slightly high-end) positioning.
It will be interesting to see how Dell positions Compellent’s disk arrays relative to the EqualLogic product line (which grew 66% in revenues over the last year), but it will be even more interesting to see what happens to Dell’s EMC reseller agreement.
#2: EMC – ISILON
EMC shelled out around $2.25 billion for scale-out NAS vendor Isilon Systems, net of Isilon’s existing cash balance. That’s an eye-popping amount of cash, particularly considering that Isilon was barely profitable, but market researcher IDC predicts that the scale-out NAS market will grow on average about 36% annually, reaching an estimated $6 billion in 2014.
According to EMC’s press release on the announcement: “EMC’s Atmos and Isilon’s solutions will offer customers a highly scalable, low-cost storage infrastructure for managing ‘Big Data’ . . . EMC Atmos object storage provides the perfect complement to Isilon for massive globally distributed environments and object access to data for usages like Web 2.0 applications.”
EMC officials estimate that the combined revenue from the Isilon and Atmos platforms will hit a $1 billion run rate during the second half of 2012. EMC also emphasized synergies between Isilon’s clustered scale-out NAS platforms and systems/software from Greenplum.
Isilon wasn’t EMC’s only acquisition this year. The company bought Bus-Tech about a week prior to the Isilon announcement. Bus-Tech specializes in VTL technology for mainframe environments. The financial terms of the Bus-Tech acquisition were not disclosed.
See “EMC snaps up Isilon for $2.25 billion” on InfoStor partner site Enterprise Storage Forum.
#1: HP – 3PAR
By virtue of its price ($2.4 billion) and the drama of the bidding war with Dell (which started at $1.15 billion), HP’s acquisition of 3PAR was clearly the #1 storage acquisition of 2010.
The acquisition of 3PAR puts HP in a much better competitive position, but it will be interesting to see what happens to the rest of HP’s disk array lineup. Does the 3PAR acquisition sound the death knell for the venerable EVA line? And what will be the fate of HP’s reseller deal with Hitachi? Months after the acquisition was announced, we still have more questions than answers on this acquisition.
2010 wasn’t a record-setting year in terms of the number of storage acquisitions, but it certainly was a record setter in terms of the amount of money that was shelled out.
As we enter 2011, the big question is: Who will be acquired next? According to the financial analyst community, CommVault is the most likely storage vendor to be acquired, but other possibilities cited by financial analysts include (in no particular order) Xiotech, Brocade, BlueArc, FalconStor and NetApp.
Related article:
Top 10 Storage Predictions for 2011 (by Henry Newman, on Enterprise Storage Forum)
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