Don't expect a storage revolution overnight

Business volumes can go up or down, but one thing remains constant: we need more storage. The storage industry seems to have managed to buck the PC hardware trend, with demand for space and the increase in platter sizes continuing unabated.

Disk drives
The hard-disk drive market is caught up in the problems affecting PC sales, yet continues to perform well.

Disk drives benefit from demand outside the core PC market. Strong laptop sales and growth in PDAs have stimulated the development of new technologies, such as smaller 1.8-inch drives for use in handhelds, and consumer devices such as MP3 players.

Drives also have applications in laptop and tablet forms, where devices are getting thinner, lighter and more economical on power, thus requiring a smaller physical drive that generates less heat.

In the IDE market, there is also strong demand for faster interface support on drives. The ATA-133 standard, which is backwards-compatible with PCs and servers that run ATA-33, 66 and 100 IDE interfaces, is proving resilient.

It allows users to narrow the data transfer speed gap between IDE and SCSI, while still spending significantly less than the cost of a SCSI drive and interface card.

SCSI continues to be in demand for digital media and high-performance web serving applications, but its role as an external drive format is being challenged by FireWire and USB 1- and 2-based devices, which are significantly cheaper.

There has been little consolidation in recent years, with the acquisition of Quantum's disk business by Maxtor the only real movement in the market.

Otherwise, the market has remained stable. Western Digital and Seagate continue to do well financially, buoyed by the fact that they are strong in both IDE and SCSI drives, favoured by many server manufacturers and disk storage array makers, such as EMC and Network Appliance.

Those companies strong in desktop IDE drives have been affected by the contraction in the PC market. With fewer desktops being sold, demand has dropped.

Tape drive/array manufacturers
While near-line tape appears to be falling from favour, larger tape formats and technologies are still worthwhile for businesses with large offline data storage and archive needs.

Companies such as StorageTek offer tape arrays that can handle up to 13.2 petabytes each, with the competitive price of high-capacity tape.

Innovation in the tape market remains limited, with the formats themselves remaining constant: the likes of LTO and AIT remain popular in equal measure.

However, tape capacities continue to rise, as do the number of tapes that autoloader systems of even robotic libraries can handle.

Optical formats such as CD and DVD offer a serious challenge, but these are so far only successful as smaller back-up solutions.

Technological changes and enhancements to tape read-write processes now mean that tapes can be used for random access. Individual files can be accessed far more quickly than before, offering real competition to hard disk and optical storage systems.

But tape libraries can easily grow into huge sprawling installations, deterring businesses with an eye on floor space and storage costs.

Tapes are prone to more wear and tear than a CD, as are the drives that read and write to them, and the tape robots used in the largest installations.

Tape continues to be very profitable for the manufacturers, with only three of the companies we looked at turning in a loss.

Disk array suppliers
Major players such as Sun Microsystems, EMC, Auspex and Network Appliance continue to dominate, offering a range of products for the middle and high-end markets.

These may represent significant capital investment, but provide reliable, highly scalable systems.

Other than taking advantage of increased disk drive capacity, there have been some milestone innovations. Network Appliance put change on the agenda when it announced a range of disk storage products based on low-cost IDE hard disks, rather than on the more traditional, and once more reliable, SCSI hardware.

The downside of IDE is performance. While the speed of disks has improved significantly over the past seven years, mainly with the introduction of ATA-100 and ATA-133, they still lag behind the highest-performing SCSI competitors, which are the preferred drives of choice for most disk arrays.

A new entrant to the market is Dell, which has begun selling a range of systems manufactured by EMC, under the badge of Dell/EMC. The products are similar to EMC's low-cost Clariion line, enhanced by Dell's traditionally competitive pricing strategy.

Near-line storage companies
Vendors of so called near-line storage devices (locally attached storage and back-up devices for single machines or workgroups) are continuing to struggle under the mounting pressure of falling hard disk prices.

Near-line storage devices are typically CD/DVD writers and other writable and rewritable optical drives, tape back-up drives, and proprietary optical and magnetic storage devices such as Iomega's Zip and the now defunct Jaz and Syquest drives.

Many manufacturers are cashing in on this trend by releasing high-capacity, low-cost external hard-disk products, allowing for portable storage that can exploit high-speed interfaces and offer a more convenient way of backing up data.

Others are focusing on CD and DVD-based storage. Quality write-once CD media can now be bought in bulk for less than 10p a disc, while rewritable media is often less than 50p. The drives themselves are also increasing rapidly in speed, with current drives capable of burning a 700MB disc in under four minutes.

Iomega has raised the stakes in the magnetic removable disk market with a second major revamp of its highly popular Zip drive.

Despite enjoying significant success with the original 100MB Zip platform, its backwards-compatible 250MB successor failed to capture the imagination of users in quite the same way. They instead turned to cheap CD writers and write-once CD media that was affordable enough to justify its lack of reuse.

The new update allows users to fit 750MB on a single disk, more than can be achieved on a standard CD. The drives will take both 250MB and 100MB disks as well, but can only read the 100MB disks, not write to them.

The casualty at this level appears to be tape. Companies such as Iomega axed their tape products some time ago and, while some manufacturers, such as HP, continue to offer near-line tape, these tend to be expensive and are often targeted at existing installed users rather than at new purchasers. Even so, tape remains strong at the enterprise array level.

FURTHER READING
www.snia.org/home
The Storage Network Industry Association is a collaboration between vendors and users analysing storage issues.

www.fibrechannel.org
The Fibre Channel Industry Association is a similar body for fibre channel users.