Storage UPDATE, June 30, 2003

1. Commentary: Storage Market Stabilizes and Prepares for Growth

2. News and Views - HP Increases Storage Services - Adaptec Brings RAID to Low-Cost Serial ATA

3. Announcements - Active Directory eBook Chapter 2 Published! - Take Our Brief Active Directory Survey!

4. Events - New--Mobile & Wireless Road Show!

5. Resources - The Benefits of SANs

6. New and Improved - Perform Unattended Backup - Increase Mobile Backup Capacity - Submit Top Product Ideas

7. Contact Us - See this section for a list of ways to contact us.

==== Sponsor: HP & Microsoft Network Storage Solutions Road Show ==== Missed the Network Storage Solutions Road Show? If you couldn't make the HP & Microsoft Network Storage Solutions Road Show, you missed Mark Smith talking about Windows-Powered NAS, file server consolidation, and more. The good news is that you can now view the Webcast event in its entirety at: http://www.winnetmag.com/roadshows/nas

==== 1. Commentary: Storage Market Stabilizes and Prepares for Growth ==== by Elliot King, [email protected]

Market research company IDC revealed numbers that show that the storage market has stabilized overall and could be establishing a foundation for future growth. Earlier this month, IDC reported that factory revenues generated by worldwide disk storage systems dropped 1 percent in first quarter 2003 compared to the same quarter in 2002. Sales performance is noticeably better than in fourth quarter 2002, which showed an 8 percent year-over-year decline. So even though sales are down, the sales performance is still better than fourth quarter 2002.

The IDC report showed that several long-term trends in the storage industry are still at work. First, companies are continuing to transition from using Direct Attached Storage Devices (DASDs) to Storage Area Networks (SANs) and Network Attached Storage (NAS) systems. For the first time, network storage systems represent more than half of the total external storage market. SAN and NAS now account for 53 percent of the external storage market, up 5 percent from a year ago. Overall, however, revenues generated by the external storage market fell 2.7 percent.

Another fact reported by IDC is that several major players continue to dominate the market. Interestingly, there's fierce jockeying for the top position in each market segment among the leading vendors. In the wake of its merger with Compaq, Hewlett-Packard (HP) has emerged as the leading storage provider, with 26.3 percent of the market, followed by IBM with 19.1 percent and EMC with 11.7 percent. Although HP is also the external storage market leader, EMC claims the title of top provider of RAID storage systems. EMC also holds the top spot in the total network storage arena (which includes NAS and SAN), with 26.3 percent revenue share. However, HP holds the top spot in the SAN arena, with 27.9 percent of the market, and Network Appliance (NetApp) is still the top provider of NAS technology, with a 37.3 percent share.

Storage continues to suffer what could be called the "mainframe syndrome." For years, mainframe computer vendors shipped increasing amounts of millions of instructions per second (MIPS) of computing power while their revenues fell. Now, storage vendors are shipping many more petabytes of capacity while the cost per petabyte plunges, cutting revenue. In fact, in first quarter 2003, vendors shipped 175.6 petabytes of storage capacity, up 49 percent on a year-over-year basis.

Despite the rapidly falling cost per petabyte of storage, administrators are still considering reengineering their storage set-ups. Information Technology Services Marketing Association (ITSMA), an advisor to companies that buy and sell technology services, conducted a survey in early 2003 of 300 IT executives from large enterprises and the government. The survey revealed that more than 50 percent of the IT executives surveyed are planning to make significant changes in their data storage systems within the next 12 months. The changes will include enterprise migrations to network-oriented solutions, a move driven both by the adoption of IP SAN technology as an extension of Fibre Channel SAN in the large organizations and by the incorporation of iSCSI in small and midsized organizations. Organizations that previously found the cost and complexity of network storage solutions unattractive or inappropriate can now consider network storage solutions a viable option with iSCSI adoption.

Another trend, as expressed in a second IDC report, shows that parallel SCSI technology will yield to Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and Serial ATA as the primary hard disk interface technology for enterprise servers and disk array systems. IDC analysts anticipate that this shift in technology will drive architectural shifts in storage infrastructure and change the way storage administrators build and deploy enterprise storage in the future.

What will drive administrators to invest in new technology, particularly as the cost per petabyte of storage continues to dive? According to the ITSMA survey, increased data volumes, improved data security, and the need for high availability systems are the influential factors. When administrators invest in their storage systems, however, their top priority is to protect their current investment.

Overall, current market research reveals a market resting at an inflection point. Although data volumes are growing, they aren't growing at nearly the rate they will when companies begin to once again invest in interesting new applications. Once companies do invest in these new applications, the new approaches to storage, which have served to stabilize the market at this point, will become the foundation for accelerated growth.

==== 2. News and Views ==== by Keith Furman, [email protected]

HP Increases Storage Services

Leveraging its service support group, Hewlett-Packard (HP) has announced new storage services. The company intends its new services to make managing storage easier and cheaper for users. The new services include a replication solution, disaster-tolerant management, optimization assessment, data sanitization, a storage area management solution, and pay-per-use solutions for storage.

The first new service is the HP Data Replication Solution. The service implements customized and integrated data replication, which takes snapshots of local storage and enables mirroring the storage snapshot to a remote site. The service works on both HP and non-HP arrays locally and remotely.

HP Disaster Tolerant Management, the second new service, prepares companies for disaster scenarios by reviewing and testing servers, networks, and recovery plans. As part of the service, HP will work with customers to make sure the customers are prepared and able to handle disasters. Rather than building their own remote data centers for disasters, customers can take advantage of 50 HP recovery centers around the world.

HP claims the third new service, HP Storage Optimization Assessment, is vendor-agnostic. The service reviews the storage resources a customer is using and helps the customer make better use of its storage investments. The service is aimed toward optimizing existing resources and not necessarily selling new hardware.

HP hopes its fourth new service, HP Data Sanitization, will prevent sensitive data from being leaked on disposed hard disks and storage systems. The service, which works only on HP hard disks now but will extend to other vendors' hard disks in the future, eliminates data on decommissioned storage devices to ensure that sensitive data isn't recoverable.

The fifth new service, HP Storage Area Management Solution, uses HP's OpenView Storage Area Management suite to manage data on EMC, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), HP, and IBM storage arrays.

The pay-per-use storage introduced by HP is available for HP StorageWorks XP 128 and 1024 disk arrays and lets customers pay a fixed monthly fee plus a variable fee based on actual usage of their disk array. The new HP services are now available from HP Storage Resellers.

http://www.hp.com/hps/storage http://www.hp.com/go/ondemand

Adaptec Brings RAID to Low-Cost Serial ATA

Adaptec has introduced a new RAID controller for the low-cost Serial ATA standard. Serial ATA is available in some new high-end workstations and entry-level servers. According to Adaptec, the new RAID card provides enterprise-level data protection. The card is part of Adaptec's plan to migrate customers from older technologies such as SCSI to Serial ATA and Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), which is expected to be released later this year.

The release of the enterprise-level RAID card for low-cost Serial ATA is a sign that the inexpensive technology can provide enterprise-level features for small and midsized businesses. "Explosive data growth among small and midsize businesses is increasing demand for storage solutions that deliver cost-effective server connectivity, enterprise-level data protection and greater throughput," said Roger Cox of Gartner Research. "Serial ATA combines all three to improve application performance and bring the cost of data reliability to a point where virtually all data can be stored on redundant systems."

The Adaptec 2410SA Serial ATA RAID card provides RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10 support. Other features include throughput as fast as 1.5GBps per port, and RAID Level Migration, which lets you perform fault-tolerance configuration on the fly. The new card is now available. http://www.adaptec.com

==== 3. Announcements ==== (from Windows & .NET Magazine and its partners)

Active Directory eBook Chapter 2 Published! The second chapter of Windows & .NET Magazine's popular eBook "Windows 2003: Active Directory Administration Essentials" is now available at no charge! Chapter 2 looks at what's new and improved with Active Directory. Download it now! http://www.windowsitlibrary.com/ebooks/administeringad/index.cfm?pc=adupd

Take Our Brief Active Directory Survey! Windows & .NET Magazine would like to know how your organization uses Active Directory. Your feedback will be kept absolutely confidential, so take our brief survey today! http://www.zoomerang.com/survey.zgi?SR9V871GEDPDXA8232G9XG8S

==== 4. Events ==== (brought to you by Windows & .NET Magazine)

New--Mobile & Wireless Road Show! Learn more about the wireless and mobility solutions that are available today! Register now for this free event! http://www.winnetmag.com/roadshows/wireless

==== 5. Resources ====

The Benefits of SANs

Managing storage assets efficiently is extremely important. Yet, managing storage directly attached to servers becomes increasingly difficult, costly, and time-consuming as the number of servers grows. Therefore, IT departments are looking to Storage Area Networks (SANs), which simplify storage-management tasks by consolidating server storage into central storage arrays that you can manage from one administrative console. To learn more about the benefits of SANs, click the following URL:

http://www.storageadmin.com/articles/index.cfm?articleid=24889&pg=1&show=786

==== 6. New and Improved ==== by Carolyn Mader, [email protected]

Perform Unattended Backup

Advanced Digital Information Corporation (ADIC) announced that it has doubled the storage capacity on its FastStor 2 Linear Tape-Open (LTO) autoloader. The new model provides as much as a week of unattended tape-drive backup capacity. FastStor 2 uses second-generation LTO drive technology and provides data transfer as fast as 30MBps and 200GB of storage per tape cartridge in native mode. Pricing starts at $10,298. Contact ADIC at 425-881-8004 or 800-336-1233. http://www.adic.com

Increase Mobile Backup Capacity

CMS Peripherals announced that its ABSplus automatic backup system is now available with 80GB of storage capacity. The increased capacity will let mobile and remote users back up their systems on the road. The new model also features a One Button Restore module to let users easily perform disaster recovery. ABSplus is available with a choice of PC card, USB 2.0, or FireWire (IEEE 1394) interfaces. For pricing, contact CMS Peripherals at 800-327-5773 or [email protected]. http://www.cmsproducts.com

Submit Top Product Ideas Have you used a product that changed your IT experience by saving you time or easing your daily burden? Do you know of a terrific product that others should know about? Tell us! We want to write about the product in a future What's Hot column. Send your product suggestions to [email protected].

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==== 6. Contact Us ====

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