Storage Effect

1. Dramatic drop in storage cost per GB.  1 TB storage units are hitting consumer price points.  16 TB storage systems are hitting SMB price points. Massive quantities of storage are now within the mass market’s reach.  And It’s only going to get cheaper.
2. Increases in storage efficiency.  Deduplication, auto-storage tiering, low-power disk drives and MAID are going mainstream, dramatically increasing the ratios of usable information per $, per square foot and per Watt. 
3. Virtualization. Server virtualization from VMWare, Microsoft and Citrix, VTL maturation, and the thin client movement are goosing storage use because storage is so easily added from a central pool.  SAN scale with DAS implementation ease.

Do you buy this reasoning? I don’t. These are real trends, and positive. But they are based on the premise of “build it and they will come”.

Tune in on Monday for the real reasons storage will continue to blow the doors off projections for the next 5 years.

Potential risk for IBM competitors currently using Diligent’s product

Byte and Switch  is referencing Israeli media reports that IBM has acquired Diligent for $200M.  The deal’s been talked about in the blogosphere, including here, for a few weeks now. 

Deduplication is an important enabling technology for the data center. Diligent, EMC’s former Israeli lab, is a dedupe leader.  It’s not clear what this will mean for IBM competitors HDS, Sun and Overland that are licensing Diligent’s technology today.

There may be a bit of scrambling as the music stops on the dedupe round of techno musical chairs.

Sound smart at your next dinner party

(On second thought, save it for your customers) 

Deduplication is hip. It’s happenin’.  How do you tout it/explain it in your solutions? The Backup Blog posted a thorough overview of the technology.  Start cramming.

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.

Deduplication prevents businesses from repeating themselves

Clever marketing from Overland Storage: contrasting their de-duplication solution with a copy machine.  For me it brings home the essence of what de-dupe is all about.

As I posted yesterday, a major headache and expense for business data protection today is redundancy, meaning copying the same files over and over and over again.  Deduplication is one of those technologies whose value is pretty easy to explain:  it makes only one copy of everything, reducing the capacity required by 10 to 20X.

Management is limited, data is not 

Rather than reduce capacity requirements, that frees up more data to be created, used, saved, distributed.  Storage demand is not limited by the amount of data created, but by the ability of consumers and businesses to effectively manage it.

Case in point: according to EMC and IDC, 2007 was the first year that the data generated and replicated in the world exceeded the storage available to keep it. 

Less data leads to more storage 

I’ll say that again: Deduplication leads to more storage.  Agree or disagree?  Tell me why.