Seagate’s CEO Bill Watkins and Marketing SVP Pat King on the Wild West of storage
Chris Meilor listened in as Seagate CEO Bill Watkins and Marketing SVP Pat King talked about Seagate’s plans for home NAS, SSD, hybrid storage and more at a recent press event. It’s a good read – check it out here.
Chris refers to the consumer storage market as the Wild West, but that moniker could easily be used to describe the storage market in general. Dramatic change is underway across the spectrum, from the largest corporations overwhelmed with petabyte growth and data on the loose to the Dawning of the Digital Consumer.
The storage industry is exciting (and always has been) for those who work in it. It’s becoming more relevant and entertaining to those outside of the industry as content and its storage matter like never before.
More video + more unprotected content = new products
Seagate CEO Bill Watkins spent 3 1/2 minutes with MarketWatch talking about the new FreeAgent line and consumer storage trends. Two takeaways:
It’s all about video. This is a recurring trend here at Storage Effect. When Seagate developed a storage calculator for PCs, it was immediately clear that video swamped all other forms of content for consumer storage.
People aren’t backing up their content. Bill said 17% of U.S. consumers aren’t backing up their content. Is this a “sub-prime mortgage” kind of thing where people don’t realize the risk they’re taking? I think it’s more that they just don’t know how exactly, and it’s not at the top of the list in a busy world.
Takeaway 1 will eventually overcome Takeaway 2. Hopefully it happens via easier-to-use products like FreeAgent and not as a response to a painful content loss.
Shipping hard drives costs more than the labor to make them
Thomas Friedman’s seminal book The World Is Flat may need an update. What happens when the cost of transportation outweighs all others in the global value chain?
In the Googlization of our society, it’s easy to miss the fact that all of those ideas are housed on physical machines that are created the old-fashioned way - they’re manufactured.
How will the global technology manufacturing value chain adapt as expensive energy changes the physical world as the internet changes the information world?
Seagate is backing up its pro-SSD words with “let’s get it done” actions
Anton Shilov at Xbit Labs reports that Seagate is co-chairing a JEDEC committee with Micron to develop SSD standards. Contrary to Anton’s comments, Seagate is on record as being pro-SSD.
Standardization will accelerate adoption of SSDs into the storage device world currently dominated by spinning disks. Having leaders from both worlds drive the standards means the job will get done right the first time.
For those with doubts about Seagate embracing a future that includes SSD, actions speak louder than words.
Storage “arms dealing”, the recession and the content revolution
Robert’s conducted a great interview with Seagate CEO Bill Watkins. He really got Bill to open up, share what was on his mind. Well, I guess that’s not that unusual…but it’s a great interview nonetheless!
Here’s a fun read from Maximum PC: David Murphy’s interview of Seagate’s Bill Watkins. He tells it like it is – which is a refreshing change from your average CEO. Bill covers a lot of ground – worth the time if you’ve got it.
Takeaways for solution providers
1 TB sounds like a lot of storage, but it’s no larger than 5 MB was in 1979. Like then, people will surprise themselves with how easily they fill it up.
Your biggest storage opportunity is helping your customers use all of their data – not just what’s on their PC.
Your customers don’t care if it’s flash or disk or optical or green goo from Mars – they want storage that works for them. Don’t get distracted.
DVDs and CDs are dinosaurs. Electronic distribution is the new species, and demands lots of storage to enable it.
Answer the question “How much storage do you need?”
Seagate has a simple tool on seagate.com (under Useful Links on this page) that helps you figure out how much storage you or your customers need for desktop PCs, notebooks and home servers. Plug in your content usage, and out pops some recommendations.
Give it a try and report back on how much storage YOU need. Also, any feedback on the tool? What could make it more useful?
Tenfold notebook failure rates for SSDs vs. disk drives
Engadget reports a 10X failure rate for SSDs in notebook PCs compared to hard drives. Can you say “early adopter”? SSDs are an exciting future, but a future still for mainstream markets.
Reliability is relative, especially in terms of the technology being replaced. The same goes for pricing - see my Flashtags posts.
Any flash early adopters out there? What’s your experience with returns or failures, either personally or through solutions you’ve sold to someone?
BluRay looks to win the battle, while electronic distribution wins the war
Nortel’s CTO John Roese dreams about the possibilities of a 4G world on GigaOm, and it makes Seagate’s CEO Bill Watkins’ comments on the Format Wars ring very true. Bill points out that the battle between BluRay and HD DVD has been incredibly overhyped, since the world is moving beyond DVDs as the entertainment medium of choice.
Electronic distribution has quietly won the war, and the spoils go to spinning media.
Consumers are downloading their movies onto their home computers at a torrential rate. Home entertainment solutions that provide terabytes of capacity are the future.
Actually, they’re here now, as anyone who walked the aisles at CES this year would know.
PCs, Home Servers and Entertainment Systems (Apple TV?) are the combatants in the next battle that matters for consumer content. Where will all of those terabytes of movies in the home reside?
Solid state drives are a winning solution – but when and where?
Bill Watkins, CEO of Seagate, talked to X-bit labs about flash and SSDs. Flash is exciting technology – just don’t expect it to replace tried and true disk drives in a big way any time soon.
Despite all the noise about flash in notebook PCs, Bill sees the first true sweet spot for flash being in enterprise applications. For notebooks, much of the power, performance and reliability benefits of pure flash are either overstated or can be gained today for a much lower cost with hybrid drives.
Hybrid drives combine flash with a disk drive and use the flash as a uber-cache, giving you the benefits of both technologies in one solution.
I’ve posted many time on this topic – here and here and here.
What say you? Will you be plunking down the big bucks for a solid state notebook this year?
Bill Watkins on surveillance and the content subscription model
The BlogHaus was hopping last night. CEO Bill Watkins came by and mixed with the blogger community. He and Robert Scoble talked about how surveillance innovation and the content subscribtion subsidy business model are driving dramatic growth in storage.
