The Internet and Storage: <<Drives with 40-GB capacity and smaller, will either phase out as we move into the next century or else increase and then decline (see chart on page 60).
Drives of 40-GB capacity and greater, however, are expected to grow in sales volume as far as the eye can see.
Porter says some 80 percent of shipments is currently in desktop drives. He also estimates shipments of server drives this year at 22 million units (see chart, above)-enough to warm the cockles of any VAR's heart.>>
techweb.com
Storage In the Age of the Internet -- It may be the new world of the World Wide Web, but you still
need storage to make the promise of the electronic world come to life.
David Gabel
Try this one on for size: Storage Technology Corp. (StorageTek) announced that it will begin
providing computer data storage on a pay-as-you-go basis. The Louisville, Colo.-based company is
teaming with Frontier GlobalCenter, the data and Internet arm of Frontier Communications Inc., to
provide what StorageTek calls Storage Utility Services. Initially, the services will be offered to a client
list that's a Who's Who of Internet cognoscenti, including Yahoo! and eToys.
Those companies all have one thing in common: They're doing business on the Internet. And they'll
soon be joined by more and more companies. It's becoming a stampede. Clearly, StorageTek may be
one of the first companies that sees the need for more storage on the Internet for functions including
e-commerce.
The Coming Revolution
Nowadays, no matter where you go, no matter what you do, you will be assaulted with something
called e-commerce. People are selling almost everything over the Web, from computers and
peripherals (a natural) to champagne glasses and other accessories. It's everywhere, like the air we
breathe, like the fish in the sea, like...
OK. It's pretty apparent that e-commerce just might take over the world. But when it does, it will need
several things, such as more servers, more bandwidth, more application development and, most of all,
more storage capability.
For those VARs who haven't realized it yet, you will be happy to know that all that e-commerce flying
around the Net means there is an even greater need for storage-not only more, but faster, in more
reliable packages that will run longer and deliver data without a hitch.
It stands to reason. Online shoppers neither want (nor need) to hear the site where they want to buy
the latest Husqvarna 16-inch chain saw is down because of a disk head crash. Nor do they want to
wait countless hours for responses about availability, and all the data that can give users the responses
they do want resides on hard-disk storage. The obvious message is more storage is needed, and it has
to be faster than ever.
Market statistics bear these observations out. Market researcher Disk/Trend Inc., Mountain View,
Calif., late last month released its estimates on the drive market to the year 2002. Those estimates
show drive sales in many capacities increasing monotonically, says Jim Porter, principal at
Disk/Trend.
Drives with 40-GB capacity and smaller, will either phase out as we move into the next century or
else increase and then decline (see chart on page 60).
Drives of 40-GB capacity and greater, however, are expected to grow in sales volume as far as the eye
can see.
Porter says some 80 percent of shipments is currently in desktop drives. He also estimates shipments
of server drives this year at 22 million units (see chart, above)-enough to warm the cockles of any
VAR's heart.
Storage Trends
Disk drive makers are ready and willing to meet the challenges of storage in the Internet age. For this
special report on storage, the editors of VARBusiness found several trends that will fit VARs for the
rigors of the storage competition ahead.
First, Fibre Channel interfaces, long a promise, are now becoming a reality as the need for faster
interconnects to storage devices pushes manufacturers to respond. Interestingly enough, SCSI will
still be a mainstream interface, particularly inside the storage box itself and for connections inside
servers, but the huge bandwidth of the Fibre Channel connection, its ease of use, and more make it a
sure bet for interconnects just around the corner. If VARs are not yet installing Fibre Channel, they
will soon.
The performance of the drives themselves is ramping up. Manufacturers are now all touting their
10,000-rpm drives, since they have solved the heat and vibration problems associated with these
turbine-like screamers. Spinning the platters at 10,000 rpm, an increase of almost 40 percent from the
older 7,200-rpm drives, means data comes under the read/write heads faster than before. That means
the bits can pump out the interface faster. It doesn't do much good to have a faster connection pipe
without having a source that can keep the pipe filled.
And to go along with that performance increase, manufacturers have moved to a head technology
called giant magneto-resistive. The heads allow for greater areal density than the older thin-film heads,
allowing more data on fewer platters for greater reliability.
It's great to have all this data and a place to put it. But the point is to get the data to the user who needs
it. Where does all this data go? To the file server? To the Web server? Which traffic takes priority?
Good grief, Charlie Brown, can someone manage this situation?
Indeed, VARs are becoming involved in providing new and improved traffic-management solutions
for customers, who don't need the technology, the management program nor a console application-but
need data. It's another growing opportunity where VARs can get back into a customer shop and be the
hero of the day. |
