Issue 10, June/July
FOCUS IT UPDATE
300,000 PETABYTES The HDD market has taken a battering in 2009 but there’s a bright future just around the corner
I
t may still be doom and gloom in the global economy but the hard disk drive (HDD) sector is set to shift more petabytes for enterprise storage in
the next two years than in the past 20-years combined. The HDD sector has been hit hard by the downturn, suffering an unprecedented decline in HDD terabyte shipments for enterprise applications in 2009, according to IDC. However, the market watcher notes that it did not deter the sector from introducing new HDD products and form factors that address current and future enterprise storage market requirements. The HDD industry is now expected to grow drive shipments for enterprise applications from 40.5 million units in 2009 to 52.6 million units in 2014. That’s more than 300,000 petabytes. The market, however, will still be hit by some ongoing trends. These include a widespread shift away from higher cost performance-optimised HDDs to lower cost capacity-optimised solutions and solid state drives (SSDs) to complement HDDs in storage systems. As a result, HDD revenue from the enterprise storage sector will grow at just 1.7% CAGR during this time. IDC also expects cash-strapped businesses to make increased efforts to make better use of storage systems. “We’re definitely seeing intensive cost cutting measures among end users striving to bring more efficiency to current solutions,” says John Rydning, IDC research director for Storage Mechanisms: Disk. “The employment of technologies such as data de-duplication, thin provisioning, storage multi-tiering, and storage virtualisation are all contributing to reducing end-user costs.” Other key findings IDC’s Worldwide Hard Disk Drive 2010-2014 Forecast: Sowing the Seeds of Change for Enterprise Applications include: • The transition from 3.5in to 2.5in performance-optimised form factor HDDs will be complete by 2012
• Growing interest in new storage delivery models such as storage as a service, or storage in the cloud is likely to put greater
HARD DISK STORAGE SALES TO SURGE TO
storage capacity growth demands on Internet data centers
• The price per gigabyte of performance- optimised HDD storage will continue to decline at a rate of approximately 25% to 30% per year
HP PLANS BLADE OVERHAUL FOR SUPERDOME SERVERS
HP is hoping to pump new life into its 10-year old, high-end Superdome servers by making them blade servers. The Itanium-based family of Superdomes haven’t changed much in the past decade. The announcement of Superdome 2 was made as part of a raft of new product launches under the new Integrity banner. The original Superdome came in its own cabinet enclosure but Superdome 2 will move to a new blade scale architecture that can be housed in a standard server rack using HP’s 7000-series blade chassis. The new servers can also be managed using the same tools used to manage HP’s existing blade systems. Customers will also be able to manage Integrity, ProLiant and StorageWorks blades installed in the same enclosure. Also launched are three new Integrity blades based on HP’s BladeSystem architecture. One of the first clients to use the new Integrity architecture was the US-based multinational energy giant Chevron, which deployed its resource-planning infrastructure on Integrity platforms. “Chevron’s consolidation project delivered huge performance gains with no increase in cost,” Steve Wilson, with Chevron’s life-cycle design, said in a statement. “We’re bringing the mission critical capabilities
of the Integrity portfolio into our converged infrastructure environment,” said Lorraine Bartlett, vice president of marketing for HP’s mission-critical systems. Other additions include the new Integrity rx2800 i2 rack-mount server and an upgraded HP-UX 11i v3 operating system, which automates workload management, enabling dynamic provisioning and de-provisioning of virtual servers according to need. HP also introduced the AllianceONE partner program, aiming to optimise complete- package IT solutions, including servers, storage, networking and professional services.
MAINFRAMES ARE NOT COMPLEX. REALLY
Aberdeen Research has released a new report that sets out to debunk the perception that mainframes are complex beasts and goes on to say that those companies that treat them right, reap the rewards. Companies that believe that mainframes are simple, says Aberdeen, have boosted the performance of their data center by 70% in the last 12 months. This is almost twice as much as companies that claim that mainframes are complex. Based on research gathered from 150 mainframe-using companies, Aberdeen maintains that mainframe users can decrease cost and improve processing power by supporting critical enterprise applications on the mainframe. “The world of mainframe computing is plagued by out-of-date perceptions and fables, among which the most pervasive is the fable of the mainframe’s complexity as a computing platform,” says Max Gladstone, Research Associate and author of the study. “The modern mainframe is a stable, efficient system. Companies that buy into outdated hype about its complexity fail to realize the potential performance gains associated with mainframe use.” The research found that the top performing mainframe users saw the power consumption of their data center increase at only 1/5th the rate of their competitors for a comparable increase in processing power.
www.datacenterdynamics.com 47
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