• Serial ATA
• Solid state disks..
• Backup SW
• iSCSI
• NAS
• Manufacturers
• US VARs
• UK VARs

Nibble - Winners and Losers from the IT Recession

At the end of a recession - the landscape of leading companies and technologies is never quite the same as it was at the start.

Contrary to what you might think recessions are periods in which innovation thrives. Because users don't have as much money to spend as they did in good times, they are more inclined to look at new technologies which offer cost savings or increase operational efficiency. Now that the recover is in full swing I thought it would be useful to take a look at some of the winners and losers of the 3 year US IT recession in the context of the storage market.

Winner:- disk to disk backup
Loser:- tape

The declining revenue in the tape library market in recent years wasn't just due to the recession. There's been a long term shift away from slow unreliable network tape backup to faster disk to disk backup which is perceived as being more reliable. Comparing the first few months of 2001 with 2003 - the tape libraries page on STORAGEsearch has dropped in popularity by 5 positions. And today disk to disk backup (which wasn't even a separate category in 2001) is now seen by 12% more readers than the tape library page.

Winners:- iSCSI, NAS and IPSAN
Loser:- FC SAN

Although SAN is still one of the top 10 subjects on STORAGEsearch (#9), it is less popular than NAS (#4) or iSCSI (#5). Back in Q1 2001, the positions were reversed with SAN being more popular than NAS. During the recession there was a lot of consolidation in the Fibre-channel adapter cards market with many companies exiting the market, and increased market share going to the top companies. As users expected their ethernet networks to get faster anyway, the idea of networking their storage via IP (instead of installing completely new Fibre channel networks) was an attractive proposition. And when some tape vendors started saying that backup times on iSCSI were nearly as fast as those on FC, the decision not to migrate to SANs became even more compelling. There was no point in doing this if it cost more, involved learning about a new set of technologies and didn't give any worthwhile speedup. Staying with IP also won the "do nothing now" vote. If users waited long enough they would get all the advantages of SAN soon enough on cheaper and more familiar IP networks.

Winners:- solid state disk accelerators
Losers:- server sales

The solid state disks market (#2 subject on STORAGEsearch throught 2003) is too small at the moment to show up as a blip in server sales, but during the recession many users found that they could halve the number of servers (and associated licenses and sys admin effort) by attaching solid state disk accelerators to their networks and effectively doubling the speed of their applications. In today's high end server systems - the main performance bottleneck is the speed of the storage system. Judicious tweaking in this area can save organisations huge sums of money. The only thing slowing down the wider penetration of this technology is that users and vendors have to have a deep technical knowledge of what the bottlenecks in their applications actually are. SSD acceleration is still some way off being a shrink wrapped plug and play solution, but its popularity (#2 subject with STORAGEsearch readers in 2003) indicates that a lot of people are looking at this technology. And when it gets simpler to use, it could have devastating affects on server CPU sales.

Winners:- Serial Attached Drives (SATA, USB, Firewire)
Losers:- Parallel Attached Drives (PATA, SCSI)

As manufacturers worked to increase the speed of hard disk interfaces, while reducing cost, serially attached storage became the dominant focus of their new product development efforts.

Throughout most of 2003 Serial ATA (SATA) was the #1 most popular page viewed on STORAGEsearch. During the recession, older serial disk connection technologies like USB and FireWire got mid life kickers in the shape of faster (but backwards compatible) respecifications. And the writing is on the wall for parallel SCSI, although the better late than never development of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) shows a migration path for that technology too.

Winners:- data recovery services?

One of the more obvious changes in user behavior during a recession is that systems are not replaced with the same frequency as they were in better times. So the average age of disk drives deployed in PCs and servers becomes a year or so older. Also users are less likely to invest in buying new backup systems. As systems get older and start to approach the wear out part of their bath tub curve users can expect to see a greater incidence of disk and tape system failures which require the special skills of data recovery services. That change hasn't shown up yet in our reader statistics, but I would expect to see it later this year.