A Year For Smarter Phones, Crowded Clouds - Page 2

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Storage In the Cloud, and for the Little Guy

The explosion of data, from creation to storing, has every enterprise pulling in servers and software to gain efficiencies and better management of all the bits and bytes.

In an EMC-sponsored digital universe study, IDC estimated that 988 billion gigabytes of digital information will be created in 2010.

Vendors, seeing the demand, are partnering and pushing out storage services like deduplication and virtualization that can work for anyone, whether it's a financial Wall Street firm or the mom-and-pop deli owner.

Cloud storage came into play big time given the cheap cost and vendors like Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) and its Web Services making it a play anyone can afford.

Amazon pushed out new features throughout the year and also reduced its already low prices in October. Last month it opened its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to Europe, providing developers there with the same computing capabilities it says 440,000 U.S. developers now use -- although only for Linux and Unix.

Even startups are moving online. Parascale's software turns commodity Linux servers into online storage nodes costing less than a piece of Bazooka gum these days -- about 25 to 50 cents per gigabyte. One-year-old Nirvanix is re-inventing the tenured storage service provider (SSP) model as an online storage delivery network (SDN) -- a unified, interconnected global platform of storage nodes costing 25 cents per gigabyte.

Titans like EMC (NYSE: EMC) moved into the cloud in a few ways.

In November EMC unwrapped its long-awaited cloud storage infrastructure solution, EMC Atmos , moving the vendor long known for proprietary hardware offerings into the market for commodity hardware. Atmos is aimed at massive global storage infrastructures, such as those in the telco, Web 2.0 and media and entertainment industries.

Earlier in the year EMC made its Retrospect Express software the connecting link between its Mozy online service and Iomega backup drives. The result is an all-in-one, local and remote protection approach aimed at small to midsize businesses (SMB).

EMC's move represented a continuing push by the leading vendor, and competitors, to reach out to the SMB and small office home environment -- which analysts view as a big market next year for every storage vendor.

Symantec (NASDAQ: SYMC) pumped up its SMB data protection and backup products as part of its acquisition of Veritas. And IBM pushed out PowerVM Express, an entry-level starter kit for smaller companies eager to start taking advantage of the considerable cost, power and time savings virtualization technology

The cloud definitely got more than a bit crowded this year, and it's likely to be standing-room only in the next few years.

Solid State Disks Land and Deliver

2008 started with a bang in terms of solid state storage technology, with EMC charging into the market with a high-end solution that had competitors salivating and running to catch up ever since.

While still an expensive solution SSD arrived from both big and new players, including Seagate, Texas Instruments, Sun and startups like Violin.

All are betting on the flash drive option and putting their own flavor into the mix. Even IBM (NYSE: IBM), NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) and HDS partners Sun (NASDAQ: JAVA) and HP (NYSE: HPQ) are now offering and developing SSD portfolios.

An IDC report predicts the technology's performance and mobility-related requirements will push SSD revenues from $373 million in 2006 to $5.4 billion by 2011.

Analysts said the technology support and innovation this year will create the foundation to make SSD as common hard drives in the storage environment.

Just this month Hitachi jumped into the SSD pool in a co-development deal with Intel and pushed out its first SSD storage offerings.

While late to the game, analysts don't believe they'll be the last to join in.