Entries tagged as ‘XIV’
Enterprise Strategy Group’s Mark Peters and I sat down in Minneapolis today and talked shop. Besides having a cool Oxford-trained English accent, his views on the storage landscape rang true to me:
- The storage system market is out of balance right now, with several “big boys” (IBM, EMC et al) and dozens of “little guys” playing in the same sandbox.
- This is not sustainable, and causing the industry mainstays to make unusually bold moves (witness EMC’s SSD and Mozy forays and IBM’s Diligent and XIV acquisitions)
- Xiotech and Atrato are exciting because they are promising clear, core benefits. “Do you want maintenance-free storage, or storage that requires service visits/costs/risks?”
- Xiotech and Compellent are both based in Minnesota with common management roots, but seem to have staked out two distinct storage solution spaces. More on this in another post.
- “Green” is overhyped. Mostly storage companies mean “energy efficient”, and would do well to be clearer on this.
Keep your eyes peeled for a new blog from Mark. Not too surprising given ESG’s success with Steve’s IT Rants blog. I hope Mark dives in. His unique perspective would benefit many.
Categories: Industry trends · Storage Systems
Tagged: Compellent, Diligent, EMC, Enterprise Strategy Group, ESG, green, IBM, Mark Peters, Moshe Yanai, Xiotech, XIV
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.
Categories: Company Profiles · Datacenter
Tagged: Byte and Switch, deduplication, Diligent, IBM, Israel, Moshe Yanai, storage, XIV
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.
Categories: Datacenter · Industry trends · Storage Systems
Tagged: Byte and Switch, Dell, Equallogic, IBM, iSCSI, storage, virtualization, VMWare, XIV
IBM acquires XIV: storage technology for a Web 2.0 world
Moshe Yanai, the man who invented the Symmetrix (and therefore EMC) decades ago, has created a game-changing storage solution at XIV, his 5 year-old startup. IBM thinks so too, it seems. They announced today that they had acquired the company.
Enterprise Strategy Group was big on XIV even before IBM announced they would acquire them. Who couldn’t like rebuilding a 1 TB drive in less than 30 minutes? An innovative massively parallel storage architecture creates all kinds of rule-busting capabilities (near-infinite scalability, high performance with SATA drives) that are only available today in massive, custom-built internet data centers.
Categories: Business Solutions · Company Profiles · Datacenter · Industry trends
Tagged: 1 TB, Enterprise Strategy Group, IBM, Moshe Yanai, Steve Duplessie, XIV
