Archiving another post from Gus on EMC thread, relevant to tape and disk based storage:
Outside of HPQ's superlative printing division which generates most of its operating profits, HPQ's business plan is actually a carbon copy of IBM's business plan while IBM's PR strategy is a carbon copy of HPQ's mindshare is marketshare PR strategy. Not surprisingly, HPQ decided to merge its storage division with its server division soon after IBM decided to merge its storage division with its server division. Look for IBM, HPQ and Sun to keep on flogging repackaged versions of the discredited notion that storage is best bought from the server vendor while an entire ecosystem of independent information caretakers -- BMC, EMC/Legato, Dell, etc -- keep on developing rapidly before their lyin' eyes.<g>
Meanwhile, watch this space. EMC now has replication technology that operates at the block, file and object levels on disk systems that range from $10,000 to $2.5M. They also have Replication Manager that allows them to create real time and variable time replicas from core to edge with the ability to reclaim the space used by those replicas and restore it to part of the storage pool. The Enguinity OS that runs on every Symm can now create up to 4 copies of every piece of data that is stored and keep those copies synchronized on a real-time basis. This real-time base layer can support all kinds of variable time copies which can be used for all kinds of applications like disk-based back-up.
I think replication is key to how EMC and Legato are going to reshape the highly inefficient tape-based back-up and restore market into rapid restore (disk), back-up (disk), active archiving (CAS disk) and passive archiving (tape/optical library).
2002 DISK REPLICATION MARKET
Source: Gartner, April 2003
Company Share($) Share(%)
EMC $ 481M 46%
IBM 115M 11%
HDS 73M 7%
NTAP 63M 6%
SYMC 63M 6%
HPQ 52M 5%
VRTS 21M 2%
LGTO 10M 1%
OTHERS 17M 16%
TOTAL $1.046B 100%
EMC currently ships 25-30 PB a quarter. The fastest growing category (in terms of capacity shipped) is their ATA-based drives. EMC shipped 2PB of ATA-based Clariions (introduced March 2003) and 2.5PB of ATA-based Centeras (introduced April 2002) in 2Q03. I think their recent reference to tape as part of their road map indicates to me that they think they can accelerate the sales of these ATA-based platforms even further by completing the data life cycle by also selling a mid-range tape library so the production data on an ATA-based Clariion used for disk back-up or the reference data on an ATA-based Centera as well as all their other disk platforms can be moved to long-term archiving in a mid-range tape library at the customer's discretion or budget.
Note that removing the restore requirements from the tape library allows customers to move away from the high-end tape oligopoly of IBM and StorageTek and towards the mid-range libaries from the likes of ADIC and OVRL. The average size of a mid-range tape library is around 50 TB.
Here's a snaphsot of this market segment which I think will be energized by the moves of EMC, the top Storage Software vendor for the last 4 years.
Tape Library Vendors
(Pure Plays)
Last 5 Fiscal Years
Fiscal ADIC OVRL DSS STK
Year
1998 $114.56M $ 92.23M $1.303B 2.258B
1999 223.37M 122.98M 1.303B 2.368B
2000 270.87M 155.70M 1.419B 2.060B
2001 364.68M 163.38M 1.088B 2.045B
2002 337.60M 195.88M 870.0M 2.040B
Fiscal
Year
Ends OCT JUN MAR DEC
TAPE LIBRARY VENDORS
(Pure Plays)
Last 12 Quarters
QTR ADIC OVRL DSS STK
MRQ $108.30M $ 56.53M $202.22M $527.26M
11 100.64M 56.20M 235.14M 479.96M
10 97.10M 48.61M 228.77M 590.07M
09 84.19M 34.54M 204.45M 501.71M
08 76.00M 34.95M 211.48M 491.93M
07 80.69M 42.84M 242.64M 455.91M
06 96.72M 45.62M 283.99M 566.37M
05 91.17M 39.89M 281.87M 498.00M
04 84.95M 37.36M 279.29M 512.13M
03 96.13M 37.02M 308.60M 468.82M
02 92.43M 43.59M 369.27M 601.44M
01 76.09M 37.73M 361.75M 486.62M
O/S 62.5M 11.3M 172.7M 109.5M
Market
Cap $624M $168M $502M $2.69B
TTM
Sales $390M $196M $871M 2.1B
PSR 1.60x 0.92x 0.55x 1.27x |
