storage history

Storage History - from 1949 and

news archive, from 2000 upto typically a week ago

Storage History - Squeaks-a-Bit - click to see storage news

Megabyte's ancestor, Sir Squeaks-a-Bit
had come over to England in 1066 with
William the Conquerer's ship in a barrel
of Normandy cheese.

editor's intro:-

This storage news archive includes thousands of news stories as they appeared in our storage news page and covers the period from January 2000 upto about a week ago. We hope you find it useful for researching articles and technology trends.

2006

STORAGE search news archive - 2006, March week 1, 2, 3, 4

STORAGE search news archive - 2006, February week 1, 2, 3, 4

STORAGE search news archive - 2006, January week 1, 2, 3, 4

2005

2004

2003

2002

2001

2000

STORAGE search news archive - 2000, December - week 1, 2, 3 - 4,

STORAGE search news archive - 2000, November - week 1, 2, 3, 4,

STORAGE search news archive - 2000, October - week 1, 2, 3, 4,

STORAGE search news archive - 2000, September - week 1, 2, 3, 4,

STORAGE search news archive - 2000, August - weeks 1-2, 3, 4,

STORAGE search news archive - January, February, March, April, May , June, July - weeks 1-2 , 3 - 4

Solid State Disks
Product Category of the Year 2005
on STORAGEsearch.com

Michelangelo found David inside a rock.
Megabyte was looking for a solid state disk.

Headquartered in San Jose,
Calif., Memtech takes storage
to the extreme with its ultra
rugged and reliable solid state
flash drives.

STORAGEsearch Reveals the Pivotal Shift in the Storage Market 2005

Editor:- November 22, 2005 - at this time of year analysts, editors, manufacturers and ISVs are busy digesting what's happened in the storage market and what will come.

Here, at STORAGEsearch, we do this kind of analysis throughout the whole year and there are rarely any surprises by the time we hit the holiday season. It's still too early to do my end of year review - but here's one question, which I think, it's safe to answer.

In the context of the storage market - what do you think is the single most important thing that happened in 2005? What's the single biggest change that analysts will track back to 2005 in future years and say "this was the pivotal moment?"

Well it's not the Sun / StorageTek merger.

Yes, it was the single most popular news headline when it was announced back in June 2005. But if we look back at the equally gargantuan and much noisier merger of HP and Compaq (completed in May 2002) we can see from this perspective that it didn't change the storage market one jot.

Yes, some vice presidents lost their jobs, and a lot of employees too. Some VARs got shuffled and some products got renamed, and some suppliers lost out in the new deal. But nothing of any significance changed. No new technologies got developed any faster than they would have done without the merger. And the same will be true of the Sun / StorageTek merger too. It will shift some points in market share and extend the shelf life of Sun - which may affect a few points of market share in the server market. But the overall impact on storage will be minimal compared to the 300+ other storage mergers we have noted before.

Looking again at the burning question of "what was the most important BIG thing in 2005". Am I saying it was technology then?

We're getting warmer there, but the long anticipated gestation (4 years) of Serial Attached SCSI into a technology that users could actually buy isn't the event either. Nor was the fact that InfiniBand (which had many near death experiences along the way) finally emerged looking as though it had found a healthy niche. As for iSCSI... (lagging years behind where IDC originally said it would be) ...that other graveyard for aspiring venture capital backed technology startups was finally nudging towards a billion dollar market.

What about the many demonstrations of holographic and other prototype technologies - which in the words of their developers would "wipe out" and replace hard disks, DVDs or tape?

2005 was an interesting year for long promised technologies to take up a bit more space in catalogs and newer technologies to be seen at events - but none of these new technologies was the big thing either. I'd better tell you, because we're running out of space here, and the list of things which weren't the pivotal changes in the storage market in 2005 is very long.

The answer is... that 2005 was the year that semiconductor storage overtook all other technologies (including disk) to become the biggest segment (more than 50%) of the storage market.

In 2005 solid state storage accounted for $45 billion of revenue. That was made up of RAM ($25 billion) and flash ($20 billion). It's the first time in the history of the computer market that solid state storage (with no moving parts) was worth about the same (or more) than all the other types of storage media added together (hard disk drives, tape and optical storage media).

That's a fundamental shift in the landscape which is not going to change. And as the solid state storage market grows and becomes more sophisticated - it will make big changes to the way that computers are designed and maintained.

Why is the change so important? We now have a storage usage landscape which has all the new interconnection technologies in place to sustain entirely new species of storage products. We're going to see Darwinian changes take place at catalyst speeds. I'll be talking more about that, as usual, in these pages later. Happy Holiday.

external Ultra 160 SCSI disks at about 1/3 the price you expect

external SCSI disks for Sun, HP
& Linux from Data Storage Depot

Serial Attached SCSI - Delivering Flexibility to the Data Center - article by LSI Logic and Maxtor

If you think you already know SAS because you know SATA and traditional SCSI then think again. Sometimes disruptive technologies wear an unassuming disguise. In fiction, Clark Kent, Frodo Baggins and Buffy Summers at first seem harmless, but we see them change into Superman, the Ring Bearer and the Slayer.

SAS too comes cloaked in plain garb - with a physical layer which looks a lot like SATA. But like the Incredible Hulk there are muscles rippling under that shirt - and you would be wrong to dismiss SAS so lightly. There's a lot more inside this interface than it says on the box as this informative article reveals. ...read the article, ...LSI Logic profile, ...Maxtor profile, Serial Attached SCSI

Squeak! - Animal Brands and Metaphors in the Storage Market

Animal marketing metaphors are popular in service industries, but you'd be surprised how many companies have used animals in their marketing of data storage products and services. The storage market was worth over $150 billion in 2005, and as it gets bigger - more companies will turn to animal brands to help differentiate their otherwise bland products and lend them artificial (or deserving) characters and virtues.

The idea behind this type of marketing is to suggest positive connotations so it's unlikely that anyone will choose to associate their products with gremlins. But you may be surprised by the population of the storage ark.

This reference articles lists all known companies who have furry marketing brands, and also includes some which are slimy, scaly and scary too. ...read the article, Mice in storage

SPARC History

Spellabyte and Terrorbyte loved sitting around
the campfire, discussing the good old days of
SPARC computing.

Megabyte's Ancestor - Sir Squeaks-a-Bit - the Unexpurgated History

Megabyte had traced the Byte family tree ancestry back to the late dark ages knight Sir Squeaks-a-Bit. An ancient scroll found in the cellars of the old book shop in Petersfield relates the story of how King Arthur won his first great battle against the Vikings.

In most of the early skirmishes, when it started to rain, the English scouts used to go back into their tents and brew up a cup of tea. By the time the rain had stopped, the Vikings, who had come in their longboats and were used to being wet, had usually surrounded the tents, cut the cords and captured everyone.

On one occasion, Squeaks-a-Bit, who didn't like tea, stayed outside Arthur's tent and fought off a dreadful force of kidnappers single handed until the weather cleared up, and the knights of the round table came out to see what all the fuss was about. For saving the king, he was dubbed a knight, but despite all his best efforts, the rain had got into his armor which squeaked a bit ever after. That was in the days before WD40.

Sometime during the reign of king Henry the 8th, the family name changed from "Bit" to "Byte" as a result of a typo on a birth certificate, and in the 18th century, the wizard Spellabyte, started his public school in Portsmouth to educate the second sons of goblins and pirates. But that's another story...

click here for today's storage news

Here are some other dates from storage history...

1998 - STORAGEsearch.com published in September by ACSL.

1995 - Xiotech founded.

1979 - How big were disk drives and memory in 1995? - Sun Microsystems launched its first 64 bit SPARC workstations, the Ultra-1 and 2. RAM was upto 512MB. The internal 3.5" hard disk provided upto 4.2GB capacity.

1994 - first directory of Fibre-channel adapters published in ACSL's SPARC Product Directory

1994 - Ancot ships first Fibre Channel analyzer.

1991 - ACSL, publisher of STORAGEsearch.com founded. Our first product (1992) was a printed directory of Sun SBus compatible host bus adapters, and SPARC workstations and servers.

1987 - RAID concept created by the University of California at Berkeley

1979 - Plasmon founded.

1979 - Bus-Tech founded.

1985 - PNY Technologies founded

1984 - Qualstar founded.

1981 - SCSI interface launched as a virtual intelligent disk drive connection.

1979 - LSI Logic founded by by Wilf Corrigan.

1980 - BMC Software founded.

1979 - Overland Storage founded.

1979 - Egan and Roger Marino start EMC.

1979 - Spectra Logic founded.

1979 - Seagate Technology founded.

1979 - SASI interface created by Shugart Associates.
1979 - This was the precursor to SCSI - article:- SCSI History - PCGuide.com

1978 - Texas Memory Systems founded.

Memories of 1978

Editor:- as an "experienced" (1 year out of college) electronics engineer in 1978 - I started designing and managing my own first complete product (an automated fuel flow consumption meter and data logger for engine test beds) using Intel's 8748 microprocessor. That was a single chip micro with I/O, timers, program and user memory all on the same chip. The memory capacity was 1k bytes (1,024 bytes) and the RAM was 64 bytes!

I managed to squeeze everything, including the operating system, into the 1k with about 5 bytes to spare - because the assembly language instructions were very efficient and occupied just 1 or 2 bytes, and I used a lot of subroutines.

Needing quite sophisticated maths and not having the time nor inclination nor memory to do this - I cheated by adding in a calculator chip as a co-processor. In future designs, as I got more experienced, and the development tools got better I did more in software and less in hardware, and made sure there were sockets for expansion memory!

In my next project - moving on from manually looking up assembly language hex codes printed on a card edited on RAM and archived on EPROM (Prompt-48 development system) - to a development system which was more like a modern computer was a great productivity aid

Intel's (blue box) development system at that time cost more than my house - which is why we only bought one after we had proved this was going to be a viable business. It included a text editor (called Edit), an assembly language linker and loader, an in-circuit emulation system, 8 bit 8080 processor with 32K RAM and a VDU and floppy disk drive. It ran an operating system called Isis - which was the model for CP/M, and later, DOS.

BTW - I didn't complain too much about the Prompt-48 - which was my idea to save cost compared to using external consultants. In fact we rented it. It was a step up from what was used in an earlier microprocessor project - which I managed - having just come out of college but having read some micro manuals - which was as much experience as anyone else had in those days.

In that earlier, 1977 system, (a ship's diesel engine training simulator with over 400 digital, and 50 analog I/O in a 15 foot long, 6 foot high metal control panel covered in switches, lamps and meters) the development tools consisted of a teletype which punched hex codes onto paper tape. We used to spool hundreds of feet of paper tape all over the floor. That's what suggested the icon we now use on STORAGEsearch.com for storage software. Click on the image (right) to see a bigger picture of the tape and hedgehogs.

1976 - the world's #1 personal computer - the APPLE-II - is launched with 48k bytes on-board RAM - from Apple II History. How much memory is that? Well a kilobyte is about a thousand times smaller than a megabyte, which in turn is a thousand times smaller than a gigabyte. The whole PC had a memory about 1,000 times smaller than the smallest flash memory sticks available circa 2003.

1972 - IBM's 8 inch floppy drive the IBM 3740 hits the market. Capacity is 250K bytes.

1970 - Intel launches the first commercially successful dynamic RAM

1979 - Western Digital founded.

1969 - StorageTek founded.

1967 - Dataram founded.

1956 - IBM invented the hard drive in San Jose, California and delivered it on September 13, 1956 as the RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control.) ... from a Hitachi news story.

1953 - IBM 650 Magnetic Drum Data Processing System Machine is announced.

1949 - An Wang invents magnetic core store.

article:- 5 Decades of Magnetic Data Storage (1940's to 1990's) - by A. S. Hoagland, formerly with IBM, (pdf)

It's many years since you've seen a storage ad with this kind of pricing. We ran this ad on the left from Dynamic Network Factory in 1999. You can see more old storage ads in our banner ad archive

Marketing Views

STORAGEsearch

SPARC Product Directory

ACSL - the publisher