If there was ever evidence that the storage market is in transition, it is the emergence of specialist storage and solutions providers in growth storage segments. DataDirect Networks has attacked the high-performance video production market with a different architecture that allows error-free writes at 6GB/second. It also recently announced a combined file and storage system capable of the distributed management of billions of objects with only one I/O request. Blackwave has completely redesigned the storage system to tackle the market for streaming and download of internet video.
The same story is happening with surveillance storage. Figure 1 shows that storage and server hardware spend will double from about $1.5B in 2007 to $3B in 2013, while the amount of storage will increase by a factor of six over the same period. That is significant growth.
The video surveillance industry is converting from analogue tapes to digital disk storage, and applications such as face and car license plate recognition are becoming commonplace. Again, new architectures that integrate the layers of computing are emerging. For example, Pivot3 is tackling this marketplace with a Serverless Computing™ Array which integrates servers and storage in the same appliance (employing Xen) with a distributed data protection system across a gigabit Ethernet network. The result is very significant savings in cost.
Digital storage solutions to tackle the video and surveillance markets may use traditional storage arrays in the short term, but new entrants into the marketplace employing completely new integrated architectures look set to take over this marketplace. If history repeats itself, the current storage market leaders will try and fail to adapt existing storage offerings and respond late in the cycle by purchasing successful companies as a defensive move.
Action Item: The key trend in the highest growth areas of storage is the development of solutions that consolidate storage, servers and networking.
Footnotes: Source for Figure 1: Frost & Sullivan downloaded 6/27/2009
