Nibble

Re: STORAGE is a discontinuous market

Discontinuous = "Being without sequential order or coherent form" - is one of many definitions from Dictionary.com But in this article I'm using the term in its formal marketing sense, as in a market which breaks links or has no roots with the past.

Here's an easy question for you...

When was the last time your company bought its web hosting services from the same company which made your PC's?

For most of you, the answer will be "never" and you probably think this is a nutty question, and that my brain has finally cracked. Yup, those mice were just were first symptom.

Fact is, that most of the discontinuous new markets which emerged in computing during the last 20 years didn't replace anything else, they were, by definition, "new". You know PC's... The web... If they replaced anything at all it was probably equipment or services which weren't part of the computer industry. But mostly they created new markets. Anyway, you might ask:- How can I claim that the storage market is discontinuous? It's been around for decades. Definitely a case of eating too much bad cheese.

Well, I'm guessing that in about 5 years time, if I asked the question - When was the last time your company bought its storage systems from the same company which made your PC's and servers? The answer, for 90% of you would be "never". And that's where the discontinuity comes in.

As our readers know, during the last few years technical developments have meant that there is no particular reason that your data has to reside in the same box as your server, or even be managed by the same operating system. As long as you can get at the data fast enough when you want it, and it's easy to back up, manage and maintain, that's all that really matters. It doesn't matter if the processors inside your storage boxes are Pentium, SPARC or PowerPC. It doesn't matter if the operating system inside your storage boxes is Windows, Solaris or Linux... and it doesn't matter if your browser is IE or Netscape.

What does matter, is that your company is probably going to spend more of your IT budget on those storage boxes, than you spend on servers, or even maybe desktops.

If you look back 3 or 4 years, storage was a little bit of other parts of the computer market. Every computer maker sold some storage as part of their product line, and in most cases they could expect to be the main supplier of storage systems to their their end-users. Most of the 3rd party independent storage companies accounted for only a tiny part of end-user sales. Most independent storage companies were smaller, in revenue terms, than the companies which made PC's or servers.

When we started STORAGEsearch in 1998, we talked about a "STORAGE market" but it didn't really operate as a cohesive market. It was a lot of little independent markets each of which was being serviced by specialist or niche technical journals. Mac storage, PC storage and mainframe storage were usually different products, marketed differently and not easily interchangeable currency. To add to the market fragmentation, companies also specialised in storage for pre-press, and other vertical applications.

Nowadays, we all own a mountain of data, and even SME's need to look at "big iron" products like tape libraries, jukeboxes, RAID and NAS. The "STORAGE market" is starting to develop its own identity, and it really doesn't matter whether your servers have "Intel inside", or are "SPARC driven" or run on elastic bands. Your needs as users are starting to converge. The companies which are solving those needs are not necessarily the same companies you have been used to doing business with. Another clue is that venture capitalists are throwing bucketfuls of money in new storage start-ups (a subject which will be discussed in my next Squeak! article). That's why I think this market is going to be discontinuous, and quite interesting for those of us who spend most of their time working in it.