The big four trends in the storage industry today: a huge cloud storage potential

March 11, 2011, the great earthquake in Japan, the resulting tsunami and the October 2011 Thai floods are a huge disaster for mankind, and the impact of these two natural disasters on the storage industry can also be described as catastrophic. Flash, for example, after the earthquake in Japan, the domestic mainstream flash product prices in a short period of time Rose 10% to 20%. The biggest impact of the quake and tsunami on storage has been a new round of investment in disaster backup. The two major disasters of the 2011 have not only affected the market pattern of the storage industry, but also brought new thinking about disaster recovery in the IT industry, and how to deal with disasters and recover quickly may become a hot topic in recent years.

Mergers and Acquisitions Act frequently

Looking back over 2011 of years of storage, storage vendors, in order to expand their product lines, the sound of mergers and acquisitions, the disk market share more and more like a few manufacturers concentrated, but also have partners for many years also because of the pursuit of their own independent path and choose to separate.

2011, mergers and acquisitions sound constantly. Large storage vendors are focused on the areas they are not good at to carry out large-scale mergers and acquisitions, thereby expanding their product lines. HDS, for example, announced the acquisition of high-end NAS vendor BLUEARC in September and announced that BlueArc's NAS gateway system has been tightly integrated with Hitachi's Hitachivirtualstorageplatform (VSP) platform Controller, This allows for file-based data to be serviced from the HDS storage array. HDS's acquisition of BLUEARC shows its importance to the emerging file storage market.

Another important acquisition is Huawei's full control of Huawei's Symantec. In November, Huawei announced a 530 million-dollar purchase of Symantec's 49% per cent stake in China. Huawei's takeover of the Chinese game, which corresponds with Huawei's sharp move in 2011, is a further indication of its ambition to enter the cloud.

In December, Gartner released data from the third-quarter disk storage market that showed a 10.4% increase in the disk storage market compared to a year earlier, although the storage market has achieved seven consecutive quarters of growth, showing signs of slowing growth. As can be seen from the report, six vendors, including EMC, IBM, NetApp, HP, HDS and Dell, have basically accounted for more than 80% of the storage market. There was no big change in the pattern compared to the third quarter of 10, and Zhang Jin, chief analyst at Gartner's Data center integration study, said the market share concentration is expected to continue.

In contrast to the above mergers and acquisitions, the partnership between Dell and EMC in October 2011 was over 10 years later. This, of course, has to do with Dell's massive acquisitions of different domain storage vendors in previous years, and Dell has demonstrated its ambition in the storage market through a series of acquisitions. EMC, a partner for many years, is becoming a competitor. From a few years ago, the Dell acquisition Compellent began, the industry is full of emc! The days of the end of the Dell brand have arrived, with two companies working together for 10 years, and the days of parting have finally arrived, and Dell has officially entered the path of independent storage. Zhang Jin said EMC's strong position in EMC has been greatly weakened after Dell turned to selling its own independent brand. But there is also a big challenge for Dell, and Dell needs to face the challenge of persuading its customers to use their products.

The growing popularity of unified storage

Today, the volume of data is increasing, and users and vendors should probably reposition Nas and SAN.

Compared with foreign markets, the growth rate of China's NAS market is somewhat out of line with data growth rules. Because NAS has a disadvantage in transmission speed compared to Sans, many users believe that NAS is a low-end storage solution, but for the current network environment, the existence of various unstructured data, NAS may be more suitable for this kind of unstructured data growth than SAN.

In recent years, the advent of unified storage may provide a good platform for the development of NAS in China. Meanwhile, mainstream storage vendors are also starting to attack the same storage market. Currently, in addition to HDS, mainstream storage vendors have a midrange unified storage product line. For example, EMC's Vnx series, released this year, replaces the original CLARiiON family, which has unified storage as its primary feature. In addition, IBM's STORWIZEV7000 series, released this year, also adds to the functionality of unified storage, and Dell's equallogicps4100/6100 and FS7500 this year also form their own unified storage product line. This series of actions shows the mainstream manufacturers of the unified storage market attention. The future trend is already clear, midrange storage products will be unified.

Cloud storage Potential untapped

The concept of cloud storage has been put forward for a long time, and most of the cloud storage models already in use are file sharing services. For example, Dropbox is an online storage service that allows users to store and share files and folders. There are also a number of online-sharing file services such as Jinshan network, which are marked by cloud storage.

However, it is undeniable that there is no mature market model for cloud storage. Cloud storage should play a greater power than this web disk. In the event of a disaster, cloud storage should be able to act as a disaster recovery role in protecting existing data centers from recovering data in a short time. As a result, the market potential of cloud storage is far from being developed. Large service providers such as carriers may be gearing up for this massive cloud-storage service.

Today, with the banner of cloud storage, storage vendors have launched a series of products and solutions. For example, EMC, the VCE alliances of VMware, Cisco's three companies, both technical and innovative, represent the highest levels of storage, server virtualization and networking, and these three alliances can be said to be fully capable of forming a complete cloud storage solution. As early as a few years ago, when 3PAR and HP and VMware formed a 3CV Alliance, this alliance and the Alliance of VCE, which crosses different product lines of the manufacturers Alliance, showing the cloud ERA in a new mode of cooperation between manufacturers.

Cloud storage is a big trend, although the current cloud storage has not formed a large market, but cloud computing for the storage industry, but also can not ignore the changes in the storage vendors want to occupy the commanding heights in the future cloud market, now with complementary manufacturers strategic alliance is necessary.

New opportunities in stability

As can be seen from recent reports from Gartner and IDC, the market share and rankings of the six largest storage companies have changed little compared to last year. Through continuous mergers and acquisitions, the market share gradually to the six major storage vendors concentrated. In the next year's storage market pattern, the unified storage market may become one of the important competition points of the manufacturers. NetApp, for example, is not uniformly global and domestic, and its domestic growth rate is well below the growth rate of the international market, a gap that may inspire it to catch up in the unified storage market.

For Dell, after breaking up with EMC, you face the challenge of promoting your products to your users. Although, in a short period of time, income will have an impact, but the sale of their own products than the sale of OEM products more benefits.

Dell's previous acquisitions have a perfect product line. For example, the acquisition of Compellent last year gave Dell the fresh blood of "mobile data". And a few years ago, with EqualLogic and Exanet, Dell has integrated the advantages of two companies into the EqualLogicFS7500 new product released this year. Dell's performance in the marketplace is not hard to predict, and Dell has a very promising storage area.

HP has been greatly enhanced in technology after acquiring 3PAR. With 3PAR's advantages in automatic streamlining configuration and storage virtualization, HP can fully take advantage of the cloud computing era. In September 11, HP released the P100003PARV series storage System for high-end markets, the first to be released after HP acquired 3PAR last year. This announcement, together with the previous release of P6000, is a step forward for HP to the converged storage strategy.

As can be seen from the published report, Oracle's market share in storage continues to decline, in addition to its own product bundle, storage is not a big move, in the future, Oracle may continue to slowly fade out of the storage market.

Although the market share by the six major manufacturers accounted for 80%, but this does not mean that the emerging manufacturers do not have the opportunity. In recent years, the emergence of SSD products, is a promising technology, and traditional storage vendors are not involved, this emerging technology market potential is far from being played out, if the traditional storage, server or operating system vendors to perfect the combination of this emerging market potential immeasurable.

2011 Storage Area Milestones

1.2011 years March 11, Japan encountered a 9-magnitude earthquake, and then triggered a tsunami. The immediate impact on the storage industry is the fast price hike in the hard drive, and the deeper impact is that the broad CIO has reconsidered the adequacy of data center considerations for disaster-recovery backup.

2.2011 year April 19, Seagate announced the acquisition of Samsung's hard drive business. The hard disk market shows the west number and Seagate two camps against the situation.

3.2011 years May, NetApp announced the acquisition of LSI's external storage-system business, which helped NetApp expand its market tentacles.

4.2011 years September, HDS announced the acquisition of BLUEARC, enhancing its technology leadership in NAS.

5.2011 years October, Dell officially stopped reselling EMC's equipment to sell its own storage devices. Two companies have shifted from cooperation to competition. Meanwhile, Dell has embarked on an independent storage path through acquisitions in recent years.

In the 6.2011 October, Thailand's floods led to another disaster in the disk market, with hard disk prices soaring, and hard disk shipments shrinking sharply compared to the previous quarter.

7.2011 November 17, Huawei and Symantec jointly announced that Huawei would buy 530 million dollars for Symantec's 49% per cent stake in China. The move shows Huawei's ambitions to enter the cloud.