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SNW 2009: Storage Industry Observations
Posted by on Wed, Oct 21, 2009 @ 09:48 AM

Here are some additional thoughts on the state of the storage industry as seen during the Storage Networking World (SNW) 2009 event in Phoenix, AZ:
Fewer vendors, but end-users aren’t slowing down
The economy has clearly impacted companies’ abilities to sponsor and even attend shows like this. Anecdotally we heard that the show floor was only about a third of the size that it was last year. Cisco & Brocade were obvious absences. However, end-user attendance didn’t change much from last year – giving the end-users a much greater advantage in numbers over vendors. The result? We really got to connect with people from a wide variety of companies and discuss a range of business problems. Sure – budgets are tight – but it felt as if most had cut what they were going to cut, and now the challenge was improving the efficiency of the existing staff by operating smarter, faster, and in a more automated fashion. 
The need for speed
The hottest topics seemed to be related to speed. There was one vendor – I wish I remembered the name – who had a display of about 8 HDTVs, each screen split into small individual cells that each played an individual movie. In front of the display was a plastic-encased piece of electronic equipment and a the tag line that read was something like “1200 DVDs streamed from 1 drive.” Other vendors big on de-duplication for the purpose of speed included Whiptail and Exagrid – there were many more. After hearing similar needs echoed in the hallways, what I take away is that the virtualization process has created new storage bottlenecks, so that’s what people need to solve next. I feel like this is a good subject for a future blog posting.

Here are some additional thoughts on the state of the storage industry as seen during the Storage Networking World (SNW) 2009 event in Phoenix, AZ:

Fewer vendors, but end-users aren’t slowing down

The economy has clearly impacted companies’ abilities to sponsor and even attend shows like this. Anecdotally we heard that the show floor was only about a third of the size that it was last year. Cisco & Brocade were obvious absences. However, end-user attendance didn’t change much from last year – giving the end-users a much greater advantage in numbers over vendors. The result? We really got to connect with people from a wide variety of companies and discuss a range of business problems. Sure – budgets are tight – but it felt as if most had cut what they were going to cut, and now the challenge was improving the efficiency of the existing staff by operating smarter, faster, and in a more automated fashion. 

The need for speed

The hottest topics seemed to be related to speed. There was one vendor – I wish I remembered the name – who had a display of about 8 HDTVs, each screen split into small individual cells that each played an individual movie. In front of the display was a plastic-encased piece of electronic equipment and a the tag line that read was something like “1200 DVDs streamed from 1 drive.” Other vendors big on de-duplication for the purpose of speed included Whiptail and Exagrid – there were many more. After hearing similar needs echoed in the hallways, what I take away is that the virtualization process has created new storage bottlenecks, so that’s what people need to solve next. I feel like this is a good subject for a future blog posting.

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Klavs Landberg is the Founder and CTO of AutoVirt. With over 30 years in the storage industry, Klavs has the unique ability to see through the noise and provide guidance on many subjects.

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