It's been a sizzling month for storage news. Here's a look at the
top 10 stories, in order of page views, getting the most eyeballs
among our readers in March.
Users quit EMC over replication
Two former users of EMC Corp.'s storage said they replaced gear
from EMC with products from other vendors last year because
competitors offered simpler product packages for replication, while
EMC spent the year caught in a flurry of acquisitions that made its
portfolio more confusing.
Cisco stamps on Brocade in Q4, Dell'Oro
saysAccording to the latest report from Dell'Oro,
Cisco is gaining share on Brocade for the second quarter in a row.
The report states Cisco earned $128 million in worldwide revenue
for storage area network (SAN) switches, which includes directors
and fabric switches, in the fourth calendar quarter of 2006,
picking up six percentage points in director market share and four
percentage points in the overall SAN switch market from the
previous quarter.
Meanwhile, McData Corp. went from $96.9 million to $90 million
losing six points of share from the third quarter to the fourth
quarter. If Dell'Oro is correct, this means that Brocade, which
acquired McData in the summer of 2006, lost those six points of
share to Cisco instead of picking them up for itself.
HP storage revenues sink, reports
IDC
The storage software and disk storage markets are plugging along at
a healthy pace, according to the latest World Software Tracker and
World Disk Tracker reports from analyst firm IDC. The same cannot
be said for some of the vendors, particularly Hewlett-Packard Co.
(HP), which showed declining numbers in several categories within
the IDC results.
HP grew 15.7 % quarter over quarter, but showed a 13.5 %
year-over-year decline in revenues. Symantec Corp. and CA Inc. also
posted more modest year-over-year declines in overall storage
software of 5.3 % and 1.1 %, respectively.
According to the report, in the fourth quarter of 2006 the
worldwide storage software market increased to $2.567 billion, up
5.3% quarter over quarter and 3.1% year over year. Revenues were up
annually 8.3% to $9.772 billion.
Hitachi unveils 1 TB drive for
retail
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies announced the first terabyte
(TB) SATA hard drive, aimed initially for the retail market. The
Deskstar 7K1000 began shipping to retail customers in the first
quarter of 2007 for $399, or 40 cents per gigabyte. An enterprise
version of the drive is expected in the second quarter of the
year.
Iron Mountain's transport methods disturb some
users
A handful of Iron Mountain Inc.'s users have stirred up some
attention on the company's delivery practices for backup tapes,
namely that it uses United Parcel Service (UPS) and FedEx, which
came as a surprise to them.
College slashes storage costs with Google
Gmail
As Google branches out from search engines to enterprise
applications, early adopter Arizona State University (ASU) said
it's saving hundreds of thousands on email storage costs using
Google's Gmail.
Currently, according to Ron Page, director of technology
integration in the university technical office for ASU, some 40,000
of the school's 65,000 students have switched to their new Google
accounts, which offer 2 GB of storage per inbox. Previously, inbox
quotas had been 50 MB per student. Page has been able to reassign a
Network Appliance Inc. (NetApp) filer saving the university
$350,000 per year in storage, maintenance and personnel costs.
Sun scraps 6920 array, offloads support to
HDS
Sun Microsystems Inc. and Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) confirmed that
the longstanding OEM contract between the two companies has been
updated, and that as part of the new agreement, HDS will be taking
over support for the ailing 6920 midrange virtualization product.
Sun picked up the 6920 through the acquisition of Pirus Networks
Inc. in 2002 for $160 million.
Users rethink Amazon S3 after performance
issues
Since its inception last April, Amazon.com has been billing its
Simple Storage Service (S3) as a tool for online companies and Web
developers to store and serve content, but some Web 2.0 companies
said the service has room for improvement when it comes to
retrieving stored items fast enough for e-business and maintaining
reliability.
One of S3's most highly touted customers, photo-sharing service
SmugMug.com, is still using the service but has seen performance
and reliability issues serious enough to prompt the company to
rethink how it used S3, according to its CEO Don MacAskill.
IBM inches past HP in external disk market
share
According to a report released by analyst firm Gartner Inc., IBM
crept past HP in worldwide external controller-based (ECB) disk
storage with a market share of 15.8% in 2006, compared to 13.1% for
HP. Both IBM and HP remain behind market leader EMC in the overall
standings. EMC increased its share from 23% to 25% for the year,
according to the report.
Brocade answers users' roadmap
questions
Six months into its $713 million acquisition of McData, Brocade is
on the road banging the integration drum and explaining its roadmap
to users. By and large, its effort seems to be paying off.
In a packed room at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Manhattan this
month, Brocade and McData users had two hours to fire questions at
Chip Cooper, a Brocade SAN engineer and doctorate in distributed
computing. One of the most surprising questions was whether the
power plugs will stay on the back or the front of Brocade's
switches.