Cloud Storage

A video in your hand = several videos in a server

September 4, 2009 – 1:45 pm

mobiletv003This report from Knowledge Networks shows that 2/3rds of 18-35 year-0lds in the U.S. carry a video-enabled mobile device.  23% of them carry an Apple video iPod, up from just 5% in 2006.

All of these video-enabled content consumers aren’t watching videos today.  But their devices are ready for the inevitable shift in behavior that will drive more and more video snacking.

Video is the killer app of information over the next decade.  Broad adoption plus higher and higher resolution will create an avalanche of content that will require one heck of a lot of storage devices to make them available.

Where will it all sit? Mobile devices will use mostly flash.  PCs will use mostly disk, with a wee bit of SSD. And data centers that store, manage and serve up all of this content will be mostly disk.

The first two categories are the visible ‘tip of the iceberg’ in data.  Massive quantities of storage comprise the rest, quietly accumulating in datacenters to make it all possible.  And every video that’s served up on a cell phone requires several copies on servers in multiple locations.

That’s why enterprise drives of the “terabyte” variety like the Seagate Constellation family are getting more and more popular.  Even the highest performance drives like the Seagate Cheetah and Savvio drives are approaching theterabyte threshold.

Expect to see continuing, relentless growth in storage demand driven by the video consumption phenomenon.

By Pete Steege | Also posted in Consumer Storage, Trends | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Streaming from my tent

July 17, 2009 – 8:38 am

wall-e2Every year my family camps out next to the lake one night in July.  Actually it’s not real camping, because we’re on my father-in-law’s lawn, and we watch a DVD (traditionally The Incredibles) on my PC.

This year we discovered that my DVD player didn’t work.  After a collective “oh no!”, we figured out that we could stream the movie WALL-E from Netflix.  Five minutes later we were enjoying our show under the stars.

This was the most tangible sign I’ve yet seen of the world’s move to the Cloud. I’m not an early adopter (not late either); yet there we were, taking what we wanted from the Ether, incrementally “free”.   

The Cloud is only going to get easier, cheaper and more mainstream from here.  It’s going to expand to include more and more forms of business content. 

I’m not going to throw out my DVDs.  And I still physically back up my precious digital stuff.  Likewise, businesses aren’t free of storage.  But how they use that storage will change. And fast.

Are you ready? Is your business?

Photo source: nuvera.com

By Pete Steege | Also posted in Trends | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (1)

Seagate BlackArmor takes businesses from startup to “IT”

June 24, 2009 – 6:24 am

seagate_ba_nas220_leftangleThere’s a dirty little secret for small businesses:  data never dies. 

Beginning the day that someone opens the doors on a new company, information is created that needs to be preserved.  At first it’s easy, but as the company grows, its information grows and becomes more and more important.  Most challenging of all, there are no do-overs with business data.  Old data needs to be brought along.

Seagate expanded the BlackArmor business line this week from two to five sytems by adding three “entry” systems:

Combined with the currently available BlackArmor NAS 440 and NAS 420 continuous backup systems for up to 50 PCs, Seagate has created a business first: a single family of storage devices that takes businesses from inception to the point where they’ve grown enough to justify dedicated IT resources. 

Changing hardware doesn’t change backup processes, since the backup software is common across the BlackArmor line.

Even companies that choose to go the online storage route have basic in-house storage needs.  The BlackArmor NAS 220, WS 110  and PS 110 are a distinctly professional ways to fill these needs. 

By the way, Seagate’s got the online need covered as well with i365.

Here’s eWeek’s take on the new line. 

Small business owners – what do you think?  How do you deal with data that never dies?

By Pete Steege | Also posted in Backup, Business Storage, Products | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (2)

Apple’s new iDatacenter

June 5, 2009 – 1:59 pm

appleAmazing how all those 8 gigabyte iPods add up.  Apple is building a $1 billion shiny new data center in North Carolina.

If a (mostly) music download business is driving the need for a $1 billion (mostly) storage infrastructure, what will the data center landscape look like when HD video is fully integrated into our lives?

Granted, Apple’s music business is the “been there, done that” piece.  Staking a claim on consumer’s digital footprint is what the data center arms race between Microsoft, Google, and now Apple is all about.

Looks like we’re going to need a few more disk drives…

Who is your brand of choice for your digital life?  Who do you think will be the Nike of data?

By Pete Steege | Also posted in Consumer Storage, Data Center, Trends | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Networks and storage: which is the chicken and which is the egg?

April 6, 2009 – 10:33 am
Source: guardian.co.uk

Source: guardian.co.uk

Networks drive storage growth.  The fatter the pipes, the bigger the content users can create and consume – from streamed HD movies to 240 TB of data moon imagery data.

No, storage drives network growth.  As Stacy at GigaOm points out, that 240 TB of data has incented Nirvanix to invest in gigabit per second network connections to its data centers.  Those HD movies were surely part of the business case for ‘last mile’ network investments by the major carriers.

Which is the chicken and which is the egg?  What do you think? 

What is clear is that the two technologies rely on each other to grow. Cisco/IBM/Sun/EMC and others are in the news these days largely due to how this inseparable tie will play out in the market.

The storage industry is fortunate to have ever faster and smarter networks around to push it forward. And network companies should be grateful for ever larger vats of storage that create a hunger that only they can satisfy.

By Pete Steege | Also posted in Data Center, Technology, Trends | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Are storage vendors middlemen?

March 20, 2009 – 6:06 am
Source: Cloud Computing Journal

Source: Cloud Computing Journal

“Where have all the agents gone?” asks Seth Godin.  Travel agents, real estate agents, etc. – all endangered species because people can more and more easily get what they want, or at least need, without them.

Are storage vendors middlemen? Some could be, and that’s not necessarily bad.  There remains a place for irreplaceable “agents” that deliver what no one else can.  

Those that see themelves in the middle need to look ahead and be sure that what they provide is something that IT can’t get further up or down the value chain.  

IT storage is at its core about the care and feeding of data.  Storing it, protecting it, dishing it out where and when it’s needed. RAID levels, deduplication rates and clustering strategies are secondary means to an end.

The Agent/Value question is worth asking  these days as Cisco stirs the IT pot with a disruptive vision for data centers.  It could be a shift as big as the one from Big Iron to the Client/Server model.

Personally, I think storage might be the one major technology category that sits next to Cisco’s commputer, but is not assimilated by it.  Data feeds their model, but its care and feeding are not at the core of it.   

What say you?  Comments appreciated, as always.

By Pete Steege | Also posted in Data Center, Trends | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

IBM, Sun and Cisco in a word: comm-puting

March 19, 2009 – 5:34 am

ciscologo01

Thanks to Om Malik for netting out the dramatic changes in the IT industry this week.  He sees Sun ceding their “The Network is the Computer” vision to Cisco, who can actually make it happen.  He coined the term “comm-puter” for this disruptive change in high-end computing. 

Turns out making the network the computer is easier for network companies than computer companies.

IBM and Sun will take a run at it too, it seems.  What an amazing Dance of the Elephants we will see over the next few years!  Many companies must now decide between the dance floor and wall flower.

GigaOm’s view is that Dell and those lower on the mega-data center food chain won’t be as dramatically affected.  Does HP need another dance partner? 

While the Commputer Dance affects storage, it seems less direct.  Storage remains a core foundational element.  It’s kind of at the end of the network – the place all the stuff resides. 

Marc Farley’s collection of the latest news on the Cisco deal is handy as well.

By Pete Steege | Also posted in Data Center, Servers, Trends | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (1)

Just-in-time SSD

February 24, 2009 – 5:00 am

Seagate’s new CEO Steve Luczo talked with InfoWorld about reducing data center power, storage and the economy, small businesses and cloud steve-luczostorage, and slower-than expected market adoption of SSD. 

SSD will be accepted by the market, no doubt!  And Seagate will be part of that market. But it looks as though those predicting the disk drive’s rapid demise at the hands of SSD were mistaken.  Not that surprising, actually; the tape-to-disk transition began decades ago, and is still underway. 

With the help of increasing powerful data management across media types, SSD, disk and tape will co-exist for some time. 

Watch for SSD products from Seagate when the time is right.

By Pete Steege | Also posted in SSD | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

The Cloud: the Big Box retailer of IT

February 19, 2009 – 6:49 am

 home-depot1 Source: Ryan Companies

I love Home Depot.  But I shop just as often at my local Ace Hardware store.  I go to Home Depot for big purchases, and stop in at Ace for quick-grab items and localized expertise.  What kind of mouse traps work best in our neighborhood?

IT will follow the same two-tier model into the next decade:

  • Cloud Computing will dominate high-volume, low-touch applications and data storage
  • In-house IT will provide critical business-customized information services either too unique or too strategic to trust to the Big Box cloud services 

HP VP of cloud strategy Russ Daniels sees a similar trend.  This flies in the face of many prognosticators of a gradual evolution to a Big Three cloud future where in-house IT becomes an administrator of out-sourcing vendors.

Both models need efficiency to succeed

While the Cloud will always have a cost advantage, both business models will rely on storage technology to dramatically increase efficiencies.  The scale of economies from cloud mega-data centers’ proprietary designs will be matched by in-house leverage of server virtualization, storage consolidation and deduplication.

After all, my Ace Hardware buddies are just as likely to look for parts for me at their computer terminal as in the store aisle.

Those that adapt find a way to thrive.  And adapting means lots more storage for both big and small IT.

By Pete Steege | Also posted in Data Center, Trends | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (1)

A new partner stadium for the i365 team

February 12, 2009 – 6:09 am

target-field

Seagate launched i365 last year, but it wasn’t a startup.  It was really a new team made up of seasoned pros in the information services world: EVault, MetalIncs and Seagate Recovery Services (formerly ActionFront). 

i365 took a step further into the big leagues this week with a unified Global Partner Program.  It’s a big step because all of the players on the i365 team rely heavily on partners to deliver their services. 

A combined partner program provides the scale to deliver more to this critical extended team.  Not only do their partners get better support, they can leverage i365’s full e-service set across their customer base. 

This is important because information doesn’t always play by the rules.  An e-discovery customer, for example,  has backup and data recovery needs as well.   

It’s kind of like i365 got a shiny new ballfield for their partner “fans”.

Play ball!

By Pete Steege | Also posted in Backup, Companies | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

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