Tag: storage

Storage sales down in 2013

Posted on February 11, 2014 by - News

ihs_storageShipments of storage products fell by five percent last year, said market research company IHS.

However, solid state drive shipments in 2013 doubled and the reason for the decline in the whole sector is because of contractions in the hard drive and optical disk drive sectors.

Shipments of storage including SSDs, conventional hard drives and optical drives totalled 755 million units. HDDs fell by seven percent to 444.4 million units, optical drives fell by 12 percent to 253 million units while SSDs rose by 82 percent to 57 million units, said IHS. The figures do not include non PC related drives.

The convential HDD sector suffered from the increase in the popularity of smartphones and tablets.  However, the enterprise PC sector is more promising than the consumer end of the show.

SSDs are likely to rise by 50 percent during 2014, reaching 189 million units in 2017, which will be half the size of the HDD market which is expected to total 397 million in that year.

Avnet in EMC push

Posted on February 11, 2014 by - News

Avnet's Lee BushnellDistributor Avnet said it has introduced a programme called Altitude aimed at small and medium sized businesses.

The programme promotes EMC storage and back up devices and aims to help its resellers offer VNXe storage and Data Domain backup products.

The scheme centres around an online configuration tool that lets resellers calculate price for the EMC products without needing to contact Avnet.  Using a secure portal, the configurator is available at all times.

Lee Bushnell, EMC business manager at Avnet UK (pictured), said that the programme will help resellers to secure lucrative revenue streams with attractive pricing.

Resellers can avail themselves of training on the portal along with sales information, data sheets and product training.

Big Data will bring bonanza

Posted on December 18, 2013 by - News

clouds3The market for Big Data tech and services is expected to be worth $32.4 billion by 2017, growing between then and now at a CAGR of 27 percent.

That’s what market research company IDC is projecting, in a report that says that growth is about six times the growth rate of the ICT market.

Dan Vesset, a VP at IDC, said that the Big Data market is growing fast as startups and large IT company attempt to take market share and fold in customers.

Cloud infrastructure has the highest CAGR in individual segments, at 49 percent until 2017.  And automation based on Big Data tech is set to affect knowledge worker roles.

And datacentres are likely to suffer too, because it will either be discarded or archived to the cloud, meaning the storage market will be affected.

Storage sales fall

Posted on December 6, 2013 by - News

emcboxThe external disk storage market posted a decline of 3.5 percent for the third quarter of this year, compared to the same period last year.

IDC, which released the data today said the total disk storage market – including internal disks – produced $7.4 billion in revenues – and that’s a 5.6 percent fall compared to last year.

Total disk storage system capacity amounted to 8.4 exabytes, growth of 16.1 percent year on year.

Despite the decline, IDC believes there is still strong demand for virtualised departments including integrated infrastructure. IDC said the reason fr decine includes reduced US government spending, more us of storage efficient technology, investment in public cloud capacity and price pressure.

The top five vendors total disk storage were EMC, HP, IBM, Dell and NetApp. HP saw a drop over the same period of 10.2 percent, IBM of 11.2 percent and Dell of seven percent.  NetApp, however posted an increase of 5.9 percent.

HP shows small signs of turnaround

Posted on November 27, 2013 by - News

HPGiant vendor Hewlett Packard turned in a profit of $1.4 billion on revenues of $29.1 billion, compared to a loss of $6.9 billion in the same fourth quarter a year back.

But although its enterprise group showed growth of two percent, its other divisions – personal systems, printing, enterprse services and software showed declines from the same period last year. Enterprise services fell nine percent, as did software.

All in all, HP’s revenues showed a 2.8 percent decline – and it expects further small declines in revenue.

The enterprise group managed to sell more storage and servers, with a two percent rise in sales. That follows CEO Meg Whitman’s decision a few months ago to shake up the unit.

Whitman thinks that HP needs to spend more money on research and development.

Startup takes on Google

Posted on November 25, 2013 by - News

google-ICA London startup thinks it can take on Google and win.

Frank Kristiansen, founder of Seevol.com, said that small companies have the ability to disrupt the Google model.

He said: “It is unheard of that a whole industry can stay so passive in its evolution for so long without being destroyed by small innovative competitors. The way search results are displayed did not change at all since Altavista in 1995 that is 18 years with absolutely no chance!”

Storage is the big problem, he believes and Kristiansen claims search results from Google and other search engines are not good.

The problem with Google, he maintains, is Adsense.  The only purpose is to redirect people to pages and to collect a small payment.

So how can Seevol improve on Google? He said his search engine will only index domains that deliver high quality results and then sift them with an algorithm to find the most relevant.

The site is not online yet and the company is looking for investors to take on Google, Bing, and the rest. Seevol didn’t say how it will solve the storage problem or what its business model is.

Quantum creates channel cloud services

Posted on October 29, 2013 by - News, Products

Clouds in Oxford: pic Mike MageeData management firm Quantum said it has introduced a new channel programme.

The programme – aimed at managed service providers (MSPs) and value added resellers (VARs) offer a cloud back up service using Quantum’s virtual dedupe appliances and vmPro back up software.

The programme uses capacity based, all software subscriptions services which lets VARs and MSPss brand, market and sell Backup as a Service (BaaS).  The offering scales as revenue grows and so Quantum thinks that reduces up front capital hardware expenses.

The programme includes online sales and pre-sales training at no charge; customisable matering material; free access to Quantum software for trial and demonstration and technical and support training.

Western Digital makes bumper profit

Posted on October 25, 2013 by - News

Western Digital logoWD turned in a net profit of $495 million on revenues of $3.8 billion for its first fiscal quarter, ending on September 27th last.

At the end of the quarter, WD ended up with cash in the bank of $4.9 billion and used some of its loot to buy back 2.3 million shares.

CEO Steve Milligan said that its HGST and WD subsidiaries performed well.

And it expects to continue to do well in its current quarter too, bolstered by thr world’s need for ever more storage.

Boston signs distie deal with Mellanox

Posted on August 14, 2013 by - News

bostonskylineBoston Limited has just signed a distribution deal with Mellanox Technologies to sell the latter’s Infiniband and Ethernet Interconnect kit, as well as rigging it up with Boston’s own server and storage tech.

Boston hopes the contract will help its growth and development in offering high performance server and storage, especially as enterprises are after scalable options running with high performance and efficiencies.

Mellanox increases efficiency, the company says, by offering the highest throughput with the lowest latency to deliver data, quick, as well as using a system to the best of its capabilities. Interconnects like adapters, switches, software and silicon will all be on offer to optimise HPC, enterprise data, cloud, storage and financial services.

Mellanox’s Darrin Chen said adding Boston Limited as a distie partner will help the company “better address customers looking to achieve their performance”.

“Across EMEA, organisations are increasingly demanding new systems with the scalable and high performance interconnect products to increase application performance and business productivity,” Chen said.

The Mellanox products are available to buy from Boston now.

Academia expands portfolio

Posted on August 12, 2013 by - News

salamancaEducation technology group Academia is launching a new commercial business team within Academia Technology Group as a reseller for enterprise customers.

Leading the team will be Richard Faucher, who has previously worked at PC World, Misco, Insight, and Computacenter, and has 20+ years in the IT sector. It will be branded Academia for Business.

Academia hopes to built on its reputation as an existing Apple, Toshiba, Adobe, HP, and Microsoft supplier but to expand with mainstream server and storage to help business customers.

In a statement, Faucher said account managers will focus on different markets, including publishing and media, telecoms and technology, law and finance, and sports and leisure.

IBM to invest $1bn in flash R&D

Posted on July 3, 2013 by - News

ibm-officeIBM has announced it will invest $1 billion into flash R&D as well as launching a series of SSD based systems.

Flash will be integrated into all IBM server and storage systems as well as a new flash only storage system.

Not only is flash a “key tipping point”, according to head of IBM software and systems, but eventually data centres will be completely comprised of solid state drives, reports Solid State Technology.

IBM has also announced plans to open 12 centres worldwide which will allow its customers to test flash products in various scenarios. They will be able to test flash performance in various scenarios that require heavy workloads like in stock exchange transactions and credit card processing.

Data Memory Systems has taken the announcements to mean all enterprise Tier 1 storage should be totally flash based, reasoning that the shift toward cloud and big data makes processing data quickly a necessity. Because traditional HDDs have not increased phenomenally in speed over the last years, flash can potentially increase processing speeds by 90 percent for certain tasks, for example in banking and trading where speed is critical.

It is not the end of traditional hard disks yet, as they still offer cost benefits now, but IBM’s decision to invest so much in flash storage shows the direction the industry is headed.

Internet of Everything becomes something

Posted on June 19, 2013 by - News

map-of-internetAccording to a report from Cisco the latest buzzword on the world wide wibble, the Internet of Everything, will become a major market earner by the end of the year.

The Internet of Everything is the networked connection of people, process, data and things so that “everything” joins the network.

Cloud computing is one of the early examples of the Internet of Things along with the boom in the mobility market.

According to the Internet of Everything Value Index study released by Cisco the global private-sector businesses to generate at least $613 billion this year.

Companies who optimise the connections among people, process, data and things will generate the largest profits, the report said.

Rob Lloyd, Cisco President of Development and Sales said that the study of 7,500 global business and IT leaders in 12 countries reports that the United States, China and Germany will earn the most.

They will be chasing the promise of nearly doubling their profits by adopting business practices, customer approaches and technologies that use Internet of Everything ideas.

He said that the Internet of Everything is already driving private-sector corporate profits, it is estimated that an additional $544 billion could be realised if companies adjusted their strategies.

“The Internet of Everything has the potential to significantly reshape our economy and transform key industries. The question is who will come out on top and win in this new economy. This study shows us that success won’t be based on geography or company size but on who can adapt fastest,” Lloyd said.

SmartThings CTO Jeff Hagins said that the study confirms the potential for the Internet of Everything.
“With the SmartThings platform and open community, we believe that more developers and inventors will be able to participate in the value chain and ultimately bring the physical graph to life,” he said.

Global businesses can pursue as much as $14.4 trillion over the next decade by using the Internet of Everything to improve operations and customer service.

 

Seagate reshuffles sales and marketing team

Posted on June 13, 2013 by - Moving People, News

seagate-longmontSeagate has announced a few changes in its sales and marketing team, most of which are centred on EMEA. The company said it reshuffled the team to address growth opportunities in cloud, SSD and branded storage markets.

Mark Whitby, Seagate’s vice president of EMEA Sales & Marketing and Global Channel Sales, said the changes will ensure that Seagate positions itself to address evolving market opportunities.

“The storage market is both growing and changing rapidly, and the changes we have made to our senior management team are intended to keep Seagate in the forefront of that market,” he said. “In particular, we want to take full advantage of the huge potential we see in areas such as cloud computing, solid state drives and in the market for branded storage solutions.”

In his expanded role as Vice President of EMEA Sales & Marketing and Global Channel Sales, Mark Whitby has now been charged responsibility for the company’s global distribution channel sales, developing and leading strategy and delivery of the business worldwide.

Joe Fagan is being appointed Senior Director of Cloud Initiatives, EMEA. In this newly created position he will be responsible for shaping Seagate’s Cloud strategy and engagement in the region.

Dimitri Galle has been appointed Senior Director of Sales and Marketing, Branded Products, EMEA. In his new position he will be responsible for sales and marketing of all Seagate-branded retail products across the region.

Bernd Breinbauer has been appointed to the newly created role of Director of EMEA SSD Sales with responsibility for developing sales of the company’s comprehensive solid state drive portfolio across the region. Seagate entered the highly competitive SSD market just a few weeks ago and Breinbauer obviously has a lot of work ahead.

Lenovo rebrands storage gear

Posted on June 12, 2013 by - News, Products

lenovo_hqLenovo and EMC recently cuddled up in a joint venture and the first LenovoEMC branded products are already hitting the market. However, as a side effect Lenovo is also rebranding some of its other storage products.

The Iomega brand seems destined for the bargain bin. It appears that it will be used solely for low-end storage solutions. The good stuff will feature the LenovoEMC brand.

“Effective immediately, the former Iomega-branded network storage products are available worldwide with new branding that reflects the LenovoEMC business while continuing to utilize the Iomega mark on entry-level consumer network storage products,” Lenovo said.

Lenovo’s high performance StorCenter px series is now the LenovoEMC px series, while the EZ Media series storage solutions and NAS gear will retain Iomega branding.

“With the transition from the highly successful stand alone Iomega brand to the power of the combined Lenovo and EMC brands, our Lenovo network storage solutions from the LenovoEMC joint venture will continue to evolve in features and capabilities as world class network storage that complements server products from the Lenovo Enterprise Product Group. This is an important element in Lenovo’s continued growth in the PC Plus world,” said Roy Guillen, vice president, Enterprise Product Group, Lenovo.

LenovoEMC today also announced an agreement with Acronis to provide True Image 2013 Lite PC backup software with all Lenovo EMC network storage products. The Lenovo EMC px series include three licenses for ATI Lite per product and Acronis will offer special pricing for additional upgrades and licences.

WD rolls out anorexic 1TB drive

Posted on June 3, 2013 by - News

westerndigitalWestern Digital has announced the world’s thinnest 1TB 2.5-inch drive. The new Blue series drives are already shipping and they are available in capacities ranging from 320GB to 1TB.

However, it’s not the thinnest thing around. Both WD and Seagate are making a lot of noise about their new 5mm drives, but they max out at 500GB. The 7mm drives are designed for mainstream notebooks and other thin and light systems, including All-in-Ones.

WD VP and general manager for client storage Matt Rutledge said consumers with huge content portfolios need not worry about getting a thin and light notebooks.

“This most compact 1TB hard drive to-date offers manufacturers of systems an upsell path for their customers who will now be able to choose systems offering both sleek design and high capacity,” he said.

Intel and Acer are also talking up the new drives, which are showing up just in time for Intel’s Haswell refresh. The new 1TB Blue drive comes with a two-year warranty and it’s priced at $139.