Entries tagged as ‘trends’
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.
11. Shift from data centers to the storage cloud. More efficient business storage models drive an increase in business content.
12. Server virtualization. “Free” servers are causing a huge increase in data center storage to support them.
13. Video surveillance. A behind-the-scenes digital video generator that is challenging HD consumer content in size and growth.
14. Increased use of data reduction practices like de-duplication. It’s not intuitive, but there’s evidence that more efficient content results in more, not less, content.
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.
Categories: Industry trends
Tagged: Backup, cloud storage, content, downloads, growth, HD, HIPAA, photos, recession, server virtualization, SOX, storage, Surveillance, trends, video, virtualization
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Categories: Industry trends
Tagged: deduplication, power efficiency, storage, trends
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!
Check it out
Categories: Datacenter · Digital Home · Industry trends
Tagged: Bill Watkins, Fast Company, Robert Scoble, storage, trends
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.
Categories: Digital Home · Industry trends · Surveillance
Tagged: Byte and Switch, entertainment, medical, storage, storage networking, Surveillance, trends, video, video production, video surveillance, Web 2.0
Tech is huge in Japan, but is mostly fulfilled by multinationals
There are 2 things I’ve learned from my colleagues here about the Japanese consumer and small business market for technology:
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The Japanese are brand-focused as much or more than any country, which means custom-made solutions have a lower share of the market than other countries.
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The early adopters are as geeky as they come! Meaning that the Japanese enthusiasts really know their stuff, and demand incredibly rich detail and knowledge from their suppliers.
For this small but passionate and high-spending segment, Akihabara is still the center of the universe. In this district in Tokyo, end users and businesses can buy any component, gadget or system known to man. A few mega-stores are the main source for most of the volume here, but there are still many mom-and-pop techno shops.
For storage, this is the home turf for 3 of the world’s 6 disk drive makers. So Hitachi, Fujitsu and Toshiba are the usual suspects for storage devices. Still, globalization has reached even the traditionally insular Japanese tech market. Seagate, WD and Samsung drives are readily available as well.
Many innovations here are designed just for the Japanese market. So if you want some fresh new-to-the-world ideas and want to see some really cool technology, find a way to get to Akihabara.
Categories: Digital Home · Industry trends · International
Tagged: Fujitsu, Hitachi, Japan, Samsung, Seagate, storage, technology, Tokyo, Toshiba, trends, WD
There’s storage behind almost every exciting innovation at CES
It’s wild and crazy here at CES , but if you listen carefully, you can hear a giant sucking sound: massive storage being pulled by incredible new audio and visual consumer technology. They’re mostly just incremental improvements on existing technology. Their adoption will drive TBs of capacity to make them real.
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Lots and lots of home theater systems – from the high end (like Kaleidascape and XStreamHD) to the mainstream (MS Media Center, Home servers and many others). All of them making it very easy to pull DVD collections and TV episodes in, requiring TBs per home.
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Bigger LCDs – which mean higher resolution. It’s hard to see the difference between standard definition and HD on a 32″ TV. But as TVs get really big (like the 150″ monster demoed by Panasonic), even HD isn’t enough. Every resolution increase multiplies the size of the content being shown (and stored)
Categories: Industry trends
Tagged: CES, HD, home server, Kaleidascape, LCD, Media Center, storage, trends
