Friday, April 10, 2009

Virtual Storage as well as Coffee Cups


The report from SNW: still a big show but not quite as large as last year. Cost cutting was top of mind, with one attendee sharing that his company eliminated styrofoam coffee cups to save $70k!

Storage news included the apparent maturing of Storage Virtualization, with 76% of attendee orgs either having already deployed or expecting to deploy a solution by next year. Companies are realizing savings from Storage Virtualization through efficient resource pooling, reduced management complexity and the ability to manage more data with the same staff. One company shared that they had 15PB all on a performance SAN, and wanted to reduce cost through tiering to cheaper arrays -- a compelling use for Storage Virtualization.

With the maturing of the category, the key players will stabilize their respective positions. But there's a potential disruption on the way, because the market still hasn't found an equilibrium in terms of form-factor, with shares split between array-based (e.g. HDS USP), appliance-based (e.g. IBM SVC and NetApp V-Series), Host-based (e.g. Datacore) and Fabric-based (e.g. EMC Invista). Expect to see innovation in how network-based technology works to improve the performance of these and other storage apps...

No comments:

Post a Comment