EMC's SAN because sales are down by about 20% of the data storage market, other manufacturers are also under tremendous pressure, industry observers believe that the data storage market, wants to be sluggish sales market.
However, even in EMC's earnings report also found some bright spots, such as its Celerra unified storage array is still maintained sales growth rate of more than 10%, other storage technologies are also trying to struggle with the downturn in market conditions orto save storage costs for the promotional selling point, either by the value for the customer to provide the necessary means so that in a difficult economic situation, customers are willing to buy them.
Economic downturn may lead to some dramatic changes and change the way customers purchase, and this change is usually permanent changes.New products may emerge and seize the market, replacing those who are considered no longer cost-effective of the old products.
The winner seems to be flash memory technology and data de-duplication technology, influenced mainly by the tape and Fibre Channel SAN market.But even in these areas, there are some products continue to maintain growth.Under the current circumstances, of course, be open-source storage technology as a cost-saving measures embraced by the marketplace.
StorageIO Group founder and senior analyst Greg Schulz said: "Now the best selling products on the market are those that can maintain normal operation of the business to help companies reduce costs, improve efficiency or productivity of the product.Duplication, flash memory, and virtual tape library is the best example of such products."
Stability of solid-state drive product sales
Schulz pointed out that SSDs good sales recently, particularly in reading and writing enhanced application environment, the solid-state disk can improve performance and efficiency.This storage vendors are saying good match.
Sun Microsystems senior director of store development, said Jim Cates, solid-state drive business profitability has been greatly improved.
Cates said: "Although people always used to use sticks to get high disk IOPS, but now many people start using solid-state disk.Flash memory prices have been reduced to the level people want to buy them, people with the high price of flash memory instead of DRAM to achieve high IOPS."
STEC solid-state disk manufacturer's vice president of marketing and business development at Pat Wilkinson also hold the same opinion.But even in the realm of solid-state disk, customers have also changed their purchase.They are now no longer buy many small flash disk, they want to buy a larger capacity flash memory disk, the capacity to obtain the lowest unit price.
For example, STEC's ZeusIOPS family contains a number of different versions of products to meet customer needs.Which includes both the highest IOPS version, including the largest capacity and IOPS lower version.STEC is now providing customers with the products of the highest capacity of 750GB, while a capacity of 1.5TB is actively developing products, said it will start selling in the fourth quarter, 1.5TB of products.
Wilkinson said: "We have noticed, the market began to save the cost of buying patterns, the direction of tilt, and the other does not require high I / O performance, but require more storage capacity in the new market is emerging.In recent months, our high-volume, low I / O market share has gone from 0% to 30%."
EMC is the first solid state disk product marketing storage vendors, and it has been the flash disk as a way to improve store level to promote.EMC believes that flash memory is the first layer, the Fibre Channel disk is the second layer, SATA is the third layer, the other manufacturers are also promoting this hierarchical model.
Users make use of some solid-state disk drive to store the maximum utilization of data, and then use a small amount of fiber channel disk to store data in lower utilization, and low prices, the largest-capacity SATA disks can be used to store large amounts of data.As the scope of most users do not require frequent data, or data that is not the most critical data, so you can use the SATA disk to store them.
EMC vice president and chief technology officer Ken Steinhardt client business, said: "They rarely use more than 6 flash disk, in the past 6 months, the first layer of the use of flash memory products has been accelerated growth."
Deduplication market contains huge profits
Steinhardt also noted that the market is to transfer data deduplication technology.As in any system there are a lot of duplicate data, so the value of this technology has a very high significance.
A pioneer in the field of data deduplication Data Domain last night, the latest earnings release.Although we are in since 1982, the most serious economic recession, the company still maintains a 30% to 40% growth rate, and it said he received in the first quarter of $ 11,000,000 worth of orders.Affected by this news, its stock rose 15% today.
Like other vendors, EMC is also hard to promote to certain areas of data deduplication technology.EMC and Dell with data deduplication technology in cooperation Quantum is pushing its products in the DXi deduplication.And compared to the previous quarter, disk and software business, revenue increased about 44%, tape automation product revenue largely flat.
Quantum's disk product marketing manager Steve Whitner said: "Quantum's data de-duplication technology to promote sales of the disk and software business achieved revenue growth of 44% of the most important factor.In the last quarter, EMC's Disk Library for a listing of users quickly gained acceptance and use of those products use Quantum's data de-duplication software, so we followed the stick a lot of light."
Tape, Fibre Channel sales
Of course, Quantum, and EMC also still in production and sale of the tape and Fibre Channel storage platforms such as old.Although these product areas are subject to a certain degree of impact, but they are not too bad in sales.Like the nineties, like the mainframe, tape eventually disappear from the market, competitors and the industry is still just wishful thinking academics.Tape technology still maintains a large user base, at least in the short term will not quickly disappear from the market.
Schulz said: "The tape is still protected, backup and archive large amounts of data the principal means."
Sun's Cates pointed out that certain small customers just beginning to feel the tape sales decline, the market is gradually being eroded by the disk market.On the other hand, Sun also found that some users still want a lot of data stored on tape, rather than they are stored on disk.
Dell'Oro Group data from the latest statistics confirm this.In the fourth quarter of 2008, Fibre Channel products, total sales are basically flat with the previous quarter.And storage areas of the market, like other products on the market can still distinguish the two types of factors Strong Tendency and weaker.For example, the Fibre Channel switch sales on the rise, it is primarily because the product price increases rather than product sales growth.Users switch of course want to buy the latest products, new products people want first to use the new features.These new features include Fibre Channel and FCoE 8Gbps and so on.
Tam Dell'Oro, president of Dell'Oro Group said that in the fourth quarter of 2008, users have begun testing the software on the Cisco Nexus 5000 FCoE switch and the Emulex and QLogic adapter products.
On the other hand, sales of host bus adapters or both up the chain have declined, Dell'Oro believe this is mainly because the server market due to sharp drop in sales volume.
Dell'Oro said: "Users are beginning to price higher, more powerful product transfer, but the Fibre Channel adapter market is not affected.On the contrary, lower prices blade server adapters to increase market share, but promoted the growth of this market."