1.HD broadcast/media is going mainstream. HD video takes 4 times the space of SD video on PCs, DVRs and the web infrastructure.
2. Higher fidelity music downloads. Apple and others race to make their music “better”, which means more megabytes per song.
3. Change in the personal media consumption model from “play” to “record”. We used to listen to phone messages, watch TV and play music. Now we archive emails, collect videos online and build a music library.
4. The expanding digital class in Brazil, Russia, India and China. Most of the planet’s population is in countries where millions of digital consumers will be created even in tough times.
5. Microsoft Vista traction. Vista is finally becoming the dominant OS. It’s a catalyst for consumer and business content.
6. Growth in home backup storage. Mainstream consumers are finally fearing the “digital housefire” enough to back up their PCs to external storage and online services.
7. Increasing mobile content consumption. iPhone and its peers multiply mobile video consumption, creating even more video to be kept somewhere.
8.Photo de-compression. More people are keeping their photos in “raw” format, taking up magnitudes more space. And megapixels continue to grow.
9.Increase in video downloads and views. Hulu.com, iTunes and Amazon Unbox are increasing video consumption for the web massses, which drives consumer and infrastructure storage.
10.The monetization of content. The 99 Cent Song and the Ten Dollar Movie have us all equating our content with cash, driving new demand to store and protect it more like money. That creates more copies.
15. Increased financial regulation. The technological result will be more data saved for longer periods, and not just by banks.
16. More companies complying with information regulation. SOX and HIPAA data regulations are finally getting legs, driving more companies to store more to comply.
Digital content is no longer a discretionary item. That’s just as true for consumers as for businesses. Content and the storage to keep It will grow through whatever economic disruption awaits us in the coming year or two.
This could rival home entertainment for generating digital content
Just saw a pitch for Sentinel2, a surveillance system for homes and small businesses. From the way its manufacturer SVAT talks about it, you’d swear it would be on the shelves at Best Buy with the flat screens and BluRay gear. This product and others like it are designed for the mass consumer market.
Most interesting: the Sentinel2 has a Seagate 160GB SV35 hard drive inside. That’s twice the capacity in my admittedly long-in-the-tooth Tivo system.
160 gigabytes in a product targeted at the consumer mass market…this has the looks of a storage killer app! That is, if SVAT et al are successful in getting us to adopt this latest new gadget.
I just found SVAT’s Sentinel1 on Amazon.com…I guess it wouldn’t surprise me to see it at Best Buy after all.
Bruce Wayne would need petabytes of storage to support his nocturnal hobby
I saw The Dark Knight. The thing I like most about this movie and its predecessor Batman Begins is their plausibility. Unlike most superhero movies, they are able to account for the hero’s “powers” with (mostly) credible technology. Not cheap or easy, but almost feasible.
So…what are Batman’s storage requirements? (more…)
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.
Building out the digital infrastructure, Japan-style
I’m back in Japan meeting with system builders and resellers. It’s always inspiring to visit the spiritual center of consumer electronics, the birthplace of legendary consumer brands like Sony, Panasonic, and Nikon.
What has struck me this visit is what’s going on “behind” the consumer. Like everywhere else, the storage and solutions business here is expanding beyond the devices used to consume digital content to the infrastrucure that creates, delivers, archives and protects it.
Video surveillance will be big even in safe Japan
The details vary by country of course. Japan is a world leader in smartphone adoption, for example, but is lagging in video surveillance adoption. There are few if any casinos (a classic early adopter of this technology) and the country is legendarily safe. But as the benefits of digitized surveillance move beyond the obvious with video analytics and other tools that make it a business tool, Japan will catch up, creating a mini-boom for storage solution providers here.
In the end, digital content and enabling technologies are a universal trend - and will come to roost in time most everywhere.
Bring digital solutions home to your customers
Looking for opportunity? Cast a wide net. Figure out where your customers can leverage an existing solution from someone like them around the corner or around the world.
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.
Removable disk drives create unique value and profitable business
Jon Johnson of CRU-Dataport described some of the new, high-growth applications for removable storage. We’re not talking about thumb drives. He sees removable storage re-inventing surveillance, education, and professional services applications in less-than-obvious ways.
Sound familiar? Nortech and Cor Digital both called out these markets as fertile ground for their businesses.
Consider enhancing your solution with technology that makes things easier and more productive for your customer – and sets you apart from your competitors.
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.
In no particular order, events and trends driving storage in 2007:
Microsoft Windows Vista. The launch has been touch and go, but eventual broad-based adoption means much more storage per PC.
“Lost data” events – TJ Maxx, the UK Government, etc. Lost and stolen customer records in the news have created a whole new category of nightmares for business owners, driving them to invest in data security. Or secure data.
Data deduplication. Amazing data efficiency is becoming readily available. Rather than reduce the amount of data saved, it’s expanding the use of archiving.
External storage drives. Prices dropped this year, spiking sales of 250GB, 500GB, even 1 TB backup drives for homes and small businesses.
Video surveillance. Analog-to-digital conversion plus image processing innovations have resulted in huge growth in terabyte-scale surveillance for businesses of all sizes.
Video downloads. iTunes, Unbox, even network TV have introduced downloading movies and episodes (and seasons) into the mainstream.
There’s more to delivering surveillance solutions than picking a hard drive, but storage plays a pivotal role in deploying rock-solid solutions that fit within your customers’ budget. Seagate has published some guidance on surveillance storage requirements:
