Storage Effect

Video surveillance drags massive storage wherever it goes

Dot Hill’s US Army contract reported by Byte and Switch points to a big increase in data collected and exploited by the military over the next few years.  A key driver will be integration of surveillance data into battlefield and strategic decision making.

Sound familiar?  The video surveillance data tsunami that has already washed over the Gaming industry has reached the military’s shore. 

Look at video’s effect on casino storage:

• Sixteen surveillance cameras can churn out 11 terabytes of data in 90 days - all of which must be kept on hand. 
• Higher resolution video analytics can up that to 44 terabytes.
• Most casinos use a lot more than sixteen cameras.

A new universal storage need

Video surveillance is racing into the mainstream as well.  This is a high growth, high capacity space to grow your storage business.

You don’t have to look far  to participate - uh, your customers?

Storage is big in Accenture’s quinquennial snapshot of IT trends 

Mary Jander at Byte and Switch talked to Accenture’s chief scientist Kishore Swaminathan about IT’s future.  He outlines eight trends driving their planning.  Lots in common with Byte and Switch’s view on storage networking trends I posted on a while back.

What do these trends mean for storage? Datacenters-as-a-service.  Per Swaminathan,

Hardware is going more and more toward scale, to the point where it won’t be economical for anyone to run a small data center.

Sounds like the future of IT resembles what’s going on inside the dataplexes of Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. today. 

Moshe Yanai and connection makes this intriguing

Byte and Switch says IBM is looking at acquiring Diligent, which includes what was EMC’s Israeli lab.  The interesting connection is Moshe Yanai, who engineered the recent purchase of Israeli-based XIV a few months ago.

An added incentive for IBM is that they have been relatively quiet about deduplication, which is Diligent’s forte.

Update:  Storagezilla adds some color on Diligent, EMC and IBM.

Storage demand is bucking negative trends, thanks in large part to video

Byte and Switch’s list of the hottest storage networking market segments shows a powerful trend at work.  Four out of their six hottest markets are video-intensive, demonstrating that moving pictures are the byte-hogs pushing content volume.

Video surveillance is number one on their list, forecast to be a $46 billion market in 2013.  These dollars are not all storage, but storage devices play a key enabling role in these solutions.

Entertainment (video production and distribution) is at #2, followed by Web 2.0 (including YouTube) at #3.  Sixth on the list is medical archiving, spurred by medical records heavy with hi-res patient images.

Conspicuously absent from Byte and Switch’s list is the home market.  Granted, much of this is not networked, but for the first time, consumer data has surpassed business data in volume.  Not as sexy as some of the above categories, but definitely worth considering if you’re a local provider looking to satisfy a growing need.

Server virtualization is helping storage shrug off a weak economy

Byte and Switch observe that disk storage demand continues to expand, even as a recession threatens in the US economy.  They see server virtualization and specifically the SCSI storage systems supporting it as the reason.

No surprise to me.  Storage demand is limited primarily by the ability to manage it effectively.  Virtualization makes server deployment easy, and iSCSI arrays make it easy to feeding their appetite for terabytes.  Case in point: Dell’s Equallogic. 

VMWare has helped open the door wide for real-world server virtualization, with Microsoft eager to walk in with Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V.

A future big spark for business storage demand will be the “top-down” mainstream technology shift driven by XIV at IBM and Hulk/Maui at EMC. 

But no one’s yet sure exactly what

Byte and Switch talks about the storage impact of social networking on pure play Web 2.0 social networking sites as well as businesses in general. 

The infrastructure seems to be emulating the network it supports, demanding what they call “cloud computing”.  The needs are less about performance or even capacity, but managing the content cloud as it grows and changes.

EMC and IBM are on it.  So are a slew of newer storage technology companies. 

One thing’s for sure about storage for social networking: there’s going to be a lot of it.

The military is living the Digital Life, driving investment and innovation

It should be no surprise that the Digital Revolution is affecting the US Military much like it is our life and work. 

Our common need: lots of content, delivered everywhere.

James Rogers at Byte and Switch found that storage infrastructure is one of the spending priorities from the recently passed Defense Authorization Bill.   

For the military, the investment are probably not driven by YouTube and iTunes and Skype.  But the need for better access to data in dicey locations does drive technology innovation:

• File sharing technology from Exponential Storage
• Portable cluster computing from Nortech
• Rugged RAID storage from Ciprico
• Rugged disk drives from Seagate

Just goes to show that we’re all living a digital revolution that’s affecting every aspect of society. Let’s hope that as has happened many times in the past, investments in defense reap innovations that help us all in our daily lives.

How can you apply this innovation in your patch of the world?