Hewlett-Packard continues to be rocked by a flood-induced hard drive shortage; its go-to printing business is sputtering; the company as a whole continues to spend too much on too many products; and it needs to get its design-and-execution mojo back. Read more »
Growth of digital content in homes and businesses continues to grow, fueling a demand for more and more storage. And though inefficiency and usability gaps in this market are showing, so too are the opportunities companies can seize to create convenient, secure and redundant storage ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The drama behind 3PAR, Redhat chasing Makara, How to become a data scientist, Amazon cuts prices on EC2 & other tales of the cloud in the Sept 2 edition of What we are reading about the cloud. Read more »
At first look, the idea of Hewlett-Packard paying $1.6 billion for 3PAR and outbidding makes no sense. But it needs 3PAR in order to compete with EMC, IBM and Hitachi Data Systems in the storage arena. Too bad that leaves Dell out in the cold. Read more »
A few days after Dell offered to buy enterprise storage company 3PAR for $1.15 billion, Hewlett-Packard says it’s willing to pay up to $24 a share, or $1.6 billion. The bidding war is a sign that the time for enterprise cloud-styled storage is here to stay. Read more »
The last decade has seen tremendous evolution and innovation in storage array technology — from the introduction of thin provisioning and ultra-wide data striping to storage virtualization in various forms of deployment, along with new generations of disk arrays, creative data retention and tiering. Many of the technologies introduced have caused significant disruption in the storage market and brought new and creative value propositions to corporate data centers the world over, lowering both storage array purchase costs and the extended cost of managing them. Many of the new innovations have enabled IT enterprises to reduce power and cooling costs, consolidate data centers and floor space, and repurpose storage assets and extend their useful life. However, even with all the advancements in storage technology, there are still gaps that need to be filled — such as in the areas of security and data de-duplication. This report looks at current key players in the storage market, highlights market drivers and the technology gaps that present opportunities for companies in the space, and forecasts the relative potential of key players going forward. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
3Par, a Fremont, Calif.-based maker of storage arrays for data centers, pre-announced lowered earnings for the first quarter of its fiscal year 2009 yesterday, blaming, among other things, the fact that customers don’t have access to the electricity needed to add 3Par gear to their data centers. Data […] Read more »
The storage industry is on the cusp of the biggest structural change since networked storage began to substitute for direct-attached storage a decade ago. Despite being one of the fastest growing technology sectors in terms of capacity, the economics for many participants are deteriorating. Several major technology shifts will radically redefine the economics of the industry leading to slimmer margins for all but the most innovative, software-driven players. In essence, the future of storage is about storage software that increasingly absorbs intelligence that used to be hard-wired in a proprietary storage controller and array, which in turn is increasingly becoming an abundant pool of commodity disks. It is the pace of this transition that is at issue. In this report, we show how the different customer segments and associated workloads will evolve at different paces, and examine the associated opportunities for both incumbents and new market entrants. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
