New market dynamics get storage vendors' competitive juices flowing
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 9/1/2005 12:00:00 AM
Sun Microsystems spends $4.1 billion to buy StorageTek. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison invests $150 million in Pillar Data Systems. And Hewlett-Packard(HP) announces a major expansion of its StorageWorks product line.
The inescapable conclusion: storage suddenly is hot. For years, the buzz in the hardware business has been around servers—their fast processing speeds, dynamic memories, and new configurations such as blades. But Stephanie Balaouras, an analyst with Boston-based Yankee Group, says two forces—digitization and legislation—have converged to spark excitement in the storage space.
Increasingly, notes Balaouras, documents, images, and other forms of data are being stored electronically, rather than filed as paper, film, or other media. "The average 5,000-employee company now stores 4 terabytes of data per year," she says.
New regulatory requirements exacerbate the situation, forcing companies to hold on to certain types of data for specified periods of time. Regulators can require companies to store product test data, quality control reports, and even e-mail. Some legislation requires companies to be able to produce this data within a given time frame in response to government inquiries, which heightens the need for sophisticated storage management systems, rather than simple tape backups.
HP's expansion of its storage offerings addresses all of these issues, according to Duncan Campbell, marketing VP, HP's StorageWorks division.
It's clear that both HP and Pillar Data Systems hope to take market share from industry leader EMC. Campbell says HP's product expansion includes new network attached storage (NAS) devices aimed at large corporations, where EMC is especially strong. Traditionally, NAS—hard disk storage devices with their own network addresses—have been geared for medium-size enterprises.
Pillar, which only recently began marketing its product after four years of development work, is offering a storage system called Axiom that consists of three different pieces of hardware, and a software package that manages the entire system. Pillar officials say the system is much easier to manage than anything currently on the market, and should attract companies looking to lower IT costs.
Industry analysts are uncertain about Sun's intentions in the storage space. Shortly after announcing the StorageTek acquisition, Sun entered a formal agreement to make EMC's storage systems compatible with servers running Sun's Solaris operating system. Some analysts also have questioned Sun's purchase of StorageTek, because StorageTek is known as a specialist in tape storage, which is considered to be a mature, if not already extinct, technology.
Featured Company
Most Recent Resources
- FICO™ Xpress Optimization Suite Schedules Big Profits For Clients
- Strategic Pricing: Three Steps to Higher Profit Margins
- Driving Innovation Through Lean Product Development Practices
- Demand Planning Maturity Model Strategies for Demand-Driven...
- Simulation-Driven Product Development:Will Form Finally Follow...
