The Storage Effect

Fortune finds hard drive companies admirable

Mark Wojtasiak — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 16:38:52 +0000

Fortune magazine released their 2010 ranking of the world’s most admired companies.

Fortune’s survey ranks companies based on nine factors:

Innovation
People management
Use of corporate assets
Social responsibility
Quality of management
Financial soundness
Long-term investment
Quality of products/services
Global competitiveness

In the computer industry, Seagate ranked number 7, and it’s competitor WD ranked number 8 … 2 hard drive makers in the top 10 of the most admired computer companies?

How admirable.

By the way, those ranking ahead of Seagate and WD … our customers.

Check it out.

They’re back…watch storage continue to grow

Mark Wojtasiak — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 19:38:35 +0000

The hard drive market grew 11% in 2009 and is expected to grow another 11% in 2010 (in units) according to The Information Network. At the same time, worldwide revenue from hard drives is expected to reach $27.7B this year. An increase of 18.4% says iSuppli in a recent article on bMighty.com.

Revenue seems to be growing faster than unit shipments if you consider the findings of both research companies. Does this indicate continued demand for higher capacity higher priced hard drives? If so, what’s would be driving this demand?

I think it’s video.

Take the marketing segment as a small economic indicator for the use of video. According to a recent study by Unica, 83% of marketers utilize video or plan to utilize video as a marketing vehicle in the next 12 months to captivate, educate, inform, entertain, and influence customer decisions. That means 83% of marketers will crave higher capacity to create, edit, store, share, and archive video. And video does not necessarily stay in one place. Companies store it locally on their network for employees, post it to their website, broadcast it on YouTube or Vimeo, share it in social media and with customers. For every single video, it may be duplicated and/or stored on multiple hard drives.

The same could be said for consumer video. Sure, consumers “broadcast themselves” on YouTube, but more than likely, create and store home grown video on their PC or external storage. (This can also be considered marketing, but not captured in the study…personal branding is another topic for another day)

Video over the last 4 years has arguably been the single largest contributor to storage demand at the consumer level.

It appears it’s becoming the same at the commercial level as well.

As a storage guy it will be fun to watch.

Seagate blogs – week in review

Mark Wojtasiak — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 22:03:44 +0000

Check out what Seagate bloggers had to talk about this past week:

Storage Effect

Test Freak freak over Barracuda XT
Cache is king but the masses still rule
Y2.011K looming for Windows XP users
Avatar still wins best picture

Inside IT Storage

Storage Review “looks under the covers” of the Seagate Constellation ES
Rorke Data & Seagate Rock the Media & Entertainment World

Test Freaks freak over Barracuda XT

Mark Wojtasiak — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 18:10:48 +0000

Test Freaks took a look at the Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB drive…check it out

10 out of 10 plus an Editor’s Choice.

“The new Seagate Barracuda XT though is a different story, this drive is fast, probably the fastest 7200RPM drive on the market today and I’m sure it will give the 10K RPM drives a run for their money as well….The new Seagate Barracuda XT drive is well worth it I think, if you’re looking for a large capacity, fast hard drive then this is the one you’ll want to get.”

Cache is king, but the masses still rule.

Mark Wojtasiak — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:22:58 +0000

Enterprise SSD has its place, and undoubtedly one place is caching. LSI seems to think so given their recent announcement around FastPath and CacheCade software enhancements to their MegaRAID line of 6Gb SATA/SAS controllers.

LSI’s says the new offerings “help to optimize application performance in direct-attached storage environments configured with solid-state drives“… and “enables SSDs to be configured as a secondary tier of cache to maximize transactional I/O performance to deliver up to a 50X performance improvement in read-intensive applications.”

What read intensive applications:

On-line transaction processing (OLTP) perhaps eCommerce applications
File servers used for compute intensive database applications seen in finance and banking.
Web servers perhaps with the exponential growth of on-demand online video.

What does LSI’s software really do? “The solution is designed to accelerate the I/O performance of HDD-based arrays while minimizing required investments in SSD technology.”

Okay…so it gives your traditional hard drive based storage more power while making your initial investment in SSD more cost effective. Sounds political… no need to make dramatic changes to policy, just economically sensible tweaks to please the masses (the independents).

Long live the hybrid model… it always seems to work out best.

Check out everything SSD on Storage Effect

Y2.011K looming for Windows XP users

Mark Wojtasiak — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 21:51:39 +0000

The industry is a buzz over the impact of hard drive manufacturers transitioning to 4K sectors by January 2011 and it’s impact on users primarily hanging on to Windows XP.

The benefits of moving to 4K sectors:

Higher capacity with more usable disk space
Runway for continued hard drive capacity improvements
Improved data integrity with larger Error Correction (ECC) block sizes

The drawback: Windows XP is not designed to handle 4K sectors and creates drive partition that are not aligned to the 4K format. Furthermore, many popular HDD imaging utilities result in the same problem – unaligned drive partitions, even on Vista or Window 7. Check out a recent BBC article on the subject. Customers wanting to stretch their IT dollar by upgrading Windows XP systems will have to rely on 4K emulation software built into the drive. Basically the drive is able to pretend it’s using 512K block sizes. This works great when hard drive partitions are aligned. But if you encounter and unaligned situation (XP or Utility created) your system could suffer a performance hit. Check out these results. Yikes!

The silver lining: yet another reason for a PC Refresh. As long as you format and partition with Windows Vista (SP 1 or older) or Windows 7, partition align is golden. If you or your customers commonly use other software for drive imaging or partitioning, check with your vendor to make sure it is compatible with 4K drives.

This is a huge evolution in hard drive technology. One that is 30 years in the waiting. Expect hard drive manufacturers like Seagate to spend a lot of time and energy around awareness and education on 4K sectors.

Is this the hard drive industry’s Y2.011K ?

Not likely, but it does make getting a new PC more inviting since I am one of those hangin’ on to Windows XP.

Avatar still wins best picture

Mark Wojtasiak — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 19:20:39 +0000

Yesterday at the Oscars, The Hurt Locker won best picture and best director. I am sure well deserving, but when it comes to reshaping the future of movie making, one cannot argue with the fact that James Cameron with Avatar will forever change the way movies are made and enjoyed.

Sure, there will always remain a desire for pure movie making: a great script, cinematography, direction, actors, sound and video editing, production. Not everyone enjoys movies of the sci-fi genra…then again who hasn’t seen Avatar? Look at what went into the main visual effects production of Avatar, and the technology deployed by New Zealand’s Weta Digital:

10,000 square foot server farm
4,000 HP servers
35,000 processor cores
Over 1,000 Terabytes of storage (>1 Petabyte)
900 people

Each minute of footage occupied more than 17GB of storage and the sever farm ranked 193 to 197th spots in the world’s top 500 supercomputers, and this is just the main visual effect work. Additional companies like ILM were hired to work on other areas of the movie.

All said, if companies like Seagate, HP. AMD, Intel, and others were part of the Academy…Avatar just may have won best picture.

Keep em coming Mr Cameron.

Check out more details about the making of Avatar here

Pent up demand…45 Terabytes worth

Mark Wojtasiak — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 17:30:34 +0000

SearchStorageChannel.com ’s annual IT Spending Survey indicates storage manager will add an average of 45TB per company this year alone. 6TB more than anticipated last year….talk about pent up demand.

Companies with >$1B in revenue a whopping 80TB
Companies with <$100M in revenue 25TB

Looking at these numbers, companies 10x bigger are only 3x bigger in terms of capacity needs. What does this say about where the growth is coming from? Once again, small to medium sized (SMB) companies, and face it, there’s many more of them than the $1B+ companies.

Given the study also indicates that storage budgets will grow roughly 3.2%, that’s a lot of bang for your buck. What are they planning to spend money on? No surprise…

Data Backup
Capacity
Data Recovery

All 3 being “nearline” applications, meaning these guys will be investing much of their dollars in lower performance (7200RPM) higher capacity Tier 2 solutions meant to best address data growth. Looking at the entire picture, the number one priority is to get a grasp on data growth and play catch up from a year of getting by with what you got.

Once under control, you can bet the push for higher performance solutions will begin to surge. Good thing enterprise SSD is on the rise, and the Tier 1 drives keep getting bigger and faster.

The future looks bright for enterprise storage.

Follow Seagate on Twitter

Seagate: http://twitter.com/seagate
Seagate SMB: http://twitter.com/seagate_smb
Seagate Enterprise: http://twitter.com/seagate_it_ent
Seagate Consumer: http://twitter.com/seagate_con

Seagate Barracuda drives get iconic

Mark Wojtasiak — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 18:47:33 +0000

A hard drive is a hard drives is a hard drive… boring to look at, but oh so important to what we do whether it’s simple external storage, everyday computing, or high performance multimedia and gaming.

Seagate recently took a new approach to hard drive marketing, using iconic imagery and emotion to depict what Barracuda drive does what. I assume this is to better inform customers of what the key differences are between Barracuda LP, Barracuda, and Barracuda XT….visually.

Oh, and there’s that other thing about standing out in a crowd of hard drive images on online reseller sites and advertising.

I think they look pretty cool, and I expect to see more of the same for Seagate’s other drives in the enterprise and notebook segments. For now, Barracuda gives you a taste of what’s to come. You can’t fault Seagate for having a little fun with the products they have been designing, manufacturing, marketing, and selling for 30 years.

What do you think of the look?

HDCCTV spec gives life to legacy surveillance

Mark Wojtasiak — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 17:04:24 +0000

The HDCCTV Alliance recently released an update to version 1.0 of the HDCCTV Specification for video surveillance.

The HDCCTV specification basically provides the standard that enables megapixel like resolution over traditional coax cabling. This is huge considering that a majority of the surveillance installations remain coax, not having switched to an IP infrastructure because of cost and comfort level. In the past, to implement surveillance that deploys megapixel cameras required some level of transition to IP. Now, legacy surveillance installations (which have lasted for years) have the capability to move to a megapixel like solution, especially for small companies who are faced with smaller budgets and lack of full time IT support.

I am sure there will be plenty to see at ISC West this year.

Of course there’s a storage angle here….more companies having the capability for greater image resolution ultimately means more storage.

Good thing there’s plenty of that to go around.