Storage News

Data Storage Industry Trends

The data storage industry is currently growing at a healthy rate as the amount of data created by individuals, businesses and research institutes continues to increase exponentially. This Digital Journal report says that this data explosion coupled with the expansion of cloud computing are creating an exciting and financially vibrant environment.

"The amount of data created by individuals, businesses and research institutes (especially institutes in the genomics sector) continues to increase exponentially due in part to the high penetration of mobile devices such as the iPhone and iPad into the general consumer market, causing the demand for data storage to become greater than ever before. As a result, hard disk drives (HDD) and solid-state storage media, such as flash memory USB devices and cards, are facing very high growth (figure 1). In fact, the demand is so high that there might be a shortage of Solid State Drives (SSD), which unlike HDD contain no moving parts and instead use flash memory and are therefore less susceptible to physical shock and vibration than HDD.

"This data explosion coupled with the expansion of ‘cloud’ computing are creating an exciting and financially vibrant environment. The industry observed two multinational information technology giants, Hewlett Packard (HP) and DELL, vying for the acquisition of a small start-up (3PAR), a virtualisation and storage optimisation expert for data centers with annual revenue of less than US$100M, with HP finally paying US$2.4B for it. Oracle has also recently hired the ex-CEO of HP and declared its intention to play a major role and compete in data storage arena.