Storage industry has huge business opportunities five of manufacturers are concerned

Although the current economy is depressed, there is still a lot of data being generated every day. As retailers start tracking individual projects by abandoning the SKU, doctors are sharing more advanced medical imaging technology, consumers are creating massive digital media libraries, and the digital world has expanded into all aspects of people's lives, with estimates of 30% to 50% more data this year than last year. Unlike other areas of the IT industry, corporate users who are struggling with budget budgets are continuing to look for storage technology investment space.

As we study the mainstream trends in the storage industry, we find that many startups have huge development opportunities, and we believe some industry giants are ready to do so. In addition, we also found that, although some enterprises have advanced technology, but lack the corresponding strategic position. We believe that the storage industry currently has the following major trends.

What is the value of the commodity hardware?

Many end users have confirmed that they do not rigidly adhere to existing storage vendors when purchasing new hardware. In fact, both large and small businesses are compare each time they expand storage capacity. Storage administrators always want to buy the cheapest disk product, no matter how much storage is required. However, the openness of commodity hardware comes mainly from storage management tools that can support different vendors ' hardware. Otherwise, managing a different storage system is certainly a nightmare for storage administrators. Fortunately, the latest storage virtualization tool allows end users to control different storage arrays through a single management platform.

On the surface, this seems like a scary thing for traditional storage vendors, because it reduces the cost of transfer. However, when some vendors, such as IBM and Hitachi, provide various tools to manage the arrays of other vendors, they earn revenue primarily by charging royalties that correspond to the storage capacity managed by the tool. As a result, they can earn a certain amount of revenue, even if they do not sell any hardware, as long as customers increase their storage capacity. As long as management software continues to adopt this pricing model, existing vendors can benefit from continued growth in data volumes.

Solid State Storage

Perhaps the hottest new technology in the storage industry is the adoption of solid-state disks. Using flash memory to replace mechanically rotating disks has several advantages, including increasing the input/output speed per second, reducing energy/cooling consumption, and so on. But because of the price and reliability problems, the technology has been promoted slowly until recently. We believe that the reliability and price problems of solid-state disk technology have been solved, and this new technology will be widely used in the next three years.

The current unit capacity price of a solid-state disk is about 10 times times more expensive than a traditional hard drive. However, the solid-state disk's reading and writing performance also reached the traditional hard disk 30 times. In addition, it is now possible to improve the storage design to solve the problem of the lack of solid state disk durability. The key to the success of solid-state disk technology is the transformation of ideas, the future should be the assessment of storage prices from the unit capacity price to the unit IOPS performance price. If your main problem is IOPS performance, you can save costs by selectively introducing solid-state disk technology.

Although we are keen on solid-state disk technology, the mainstream storage market is expected to remain dominated by traditional hard drives for several years. The best solution at present is to implement a grading strategy for the main memory, keeping the most commonly used data on a solid state disk. Many of the vendors we surveyed are actively exploring ways to integrate solid-state disk technology into their respective products.

Cloud storage

We believe that the cloud may be the most used technology industry, but the concept of least understanding. For storage, however, the cloud concept is actually fairly straightforward. Cloud storage refers to storing and reading data on the Internet, which is a public or private data center. It is important to note that the private data center described here is different from the locally managed main memory. There are many different kinds of cloud storage models, which include both simple cloud models that can only be stored, and a relatively complex cloud model, where all applications are offline in relation to storage devices, all over the Internet. This integrated cloud model has many advantages, including sizing to accommodate requirements, adjusting external resources to disaster recovery requirements, and improving hardware utilization, among others. However, there are many obstacles to the application of cloud storage, including data confidentiality, limited service level protocol and bandwidth constraints. We believe that cloud storage solutions in archiving and disaster recovery systems can bring immediate short-term benefits to enterprise users, but for most businesses it is not possible to migrate the entire data center to an offline cloud for the foreseeable future.

Duplicate Data deletion

The most cost-pressured project in the storage infrastructure is to store multiple copies of the same data for backup and archive systems. This is why the entire storage industry is welcoming the data de-duplication technology. Previously, there would be multiple copies of the same data in the system, and there would be only one copy of the shared data and many indicators in the system after the data de-duplication technology. Basically, the same PowerPoint presentation file does not need to store 50 copies, and the system stores a copy and 49 indicators. The most effective products today can combine software with hardware, using data de-duplication technology to integrate them into an independent product. However, major manufacturers in the industry have introduced a software-type de-duplication product, and we anticipate that data de-duplication will be one of the essential features of all archiving and backup systems in the next few years.

Investment opportunities in storage areas

Our survey of opportunities and trends in the storage industry found that even the largest manufacturers still have room to grow. The recent stock market rally has left many storage vendors out of the 5, but we feel that continued weakness in IT spending is likely to keep those stocks down in the next few months, giving investors a good chance of getting in. Therefore, we advise investors to focus on the following manufacturers, which have been adjusted and prepared and will soon take advantage of these market trends to gain substantial benefits.

EMC

As a giant in the networked storage market, EMC has the ability to focus on new technologies with a wealth of research, marketing, and distribution resources. EMC is one of the leading vendors to launch solid-state disk products, and recently announced a new high-end Symmetrix array. With more than 400 hardware engineers and more than 8,000 software engineers, EMC is now clearly concentrating its resources in the area of software value.

NetApp

Still leads the intermediate storage System market, mainly processing file-level data such as spreadsheets, emails and pictures, and so on, rather than module-level data such as databases. NetApp has focused on a variety of networked storage technologies, and it stands out in the intermediate market. The company has annual sales of more than 3 billion U.S. dollars and has all the important resources needed to advance innovation. NetApp's release of the next version of storage operating system is expected to significantly increase the capacity of the file Manager to meet the needs of modern data management.

Compellent

is an obscure start-up, but it has two key advantages. The first is that it has an advanced technology that can achieve high performance with minimal management requirements. Its software automates the transfer of the highest usage data to a high-speed disk, while storing old data that is not high in speed on relatively slow, inexpensive disks. Second, the manufacturer uses an effective whole-channel distribution model to target customers to specific mid-level customer groups.

It is not enough to have advanced technology, and to identify investment opportunities in the storage industry, you must distinguish between technology and business model concepts. Although the following manufacturers in the technology innovation is perfect, but their position in the industry is not satisfactory.

3PAR

Although we are very bullish on 3PAR technology, we are concerned that it still cannot compete with EMC and other vendors in the High-performance market. 3PAR technology is advanced and its products can even match the latest EMC products. But this similarity is not good news for business companies, and we fear that 3PAR may not be able to achieve greater success because of the strong reaction of the storage giants.

Data Domain

Is the first vendor to launch a data de-duplication solution. It also ran ahead of other competitors because of this advantage. However, we believe that Datadomain's competitive edge will surely disappear as the storage giants begin to launch similar competitive offerings. We believe that duplicate data removal technology will eventually become a prerequisite for storage systems, not as stand-alone products.