Dell bought EqualLogic
After only a few months after its first serious attempt to engage the channel, Dell surprised the market its first major purchase.
This purchase of EqualLogic, pioneer of iSCSI, done in January, has attracted attention for several reasons. She made Dell a leader in technology, which Dell does not sell and does not provide for the rights of other OEM. She immediately gave Dell already ready channel to go with its new strategy of partnership.
Companies took about six months to persuade the key suppliers to start working with a new product vendor EqualLogic, but Dell has managed to win them to his side.
That purchase immediately made its rival Dell, the largest partner in a SAN, EMC. After buying the share of income from sales of Dell products EMC beginning to fall, but both companies say that everything is fine.
Purchase, which cost 1.4 billion dollars, was seen by many as an expensive, but Dell had not poskupitsya to circumvent potential rivals, especially HP, which is rumored to have also pritsenivalas to EqualLogic.
HP bought LeftHand
HP has not received EqualLogic, but she received the company is no worse and for far less cost, when it bought LeftHand Networks, the second leader in iSCSI, for 360 million dollars in September.
This purchase HP attached great acceleration iSCSI market and has helped to legitimize the concept of virtual storage devices. LeftHand is one of the pioneers in the creation of iSCSI, or any storage device over the virtual server, so that customers can add a new storage device to a virtual infrastructure without having to install additional equipment.
EMC metit below
In April, EMC acquired Iomega, manufacturer of storage devices to market PSC / SOHO, linking its offer online storage service Mozy, bought in late 2007, and its Retrospect backup program for the PSC.
Suppliers of solutions called EMC most friendly to the channel vendor in the categories of equipment and storage of data in the form Annual Report Card VARBusiness magazine in 2008 severing of the company from rivals was more than any other vendor in any other category.
SAN sales fell, but not gone
Suppliers of solutions rather optimistic assess the prospects for sales in the segment of data storage. Customers are invited to help with services or otherwise, to improve the efficiency of storage and better protect their growing repository of data.
At the same time, sales at the level of SAN vendors has slowed sharply in 2008 as customers reduced their budgets and are now seeking to squeeze out the maximum performance from the already established oborudovaniya.IDC reported in December 2008 that sales of disk storage in the matrix III quarter rose to a marginal 1.1% compared with the same period a year ago. In December 2007, the same increase of 4.3%.
(Almost) free Server Virtualization
The leader of this market, the company VMware announced in July that will begin to offer its technology ESXi for free download – with the same discount price of $ 400 for each virtual server.
The move was a response to the issue hypervisor Hyper-V by Microsoft in early 2008, which was included in the distribution of its new operating system Windows Server 2008.
«Clouds» were seen more clearly
Talking about the «cloud» calculations have gone long ago, but in 2008, vendors, particularly in the areas of storage, steel, finally, to discuss their strategii.Za the past two years we have seen a lot of purchases of companies that have developed technology on-line store, but in 2008 . vendors were able to turn them into real products.
Seagate introduced in 2008 a new company i365, created on the basis of four purchases, including eVault. EMC has made a purchase Mozy in its first managed services.
HP nearly ostupilas after the purchase of Australian technology, which zabastovala, the first time the brand is associated with HP. IBM led the market the technology on-line store, obtained with the purchase of Arsenal Digital. Symantec offered to channel technology SwapDrive, purchased in 2008
Many vendors make this technology into a platform on which others can build on-line services and IT management. For example, Symantec and EMC plan to offer security as a service ( «SaaS») on the basis of their online platforms backup.
The advent of machines with SSD-drives
Semiconductor drives, or SSD (solid-state drive), has long been known, but in 2008 became a turning point for this technology. The catalyst was the decision by EMC in January 2008 to offer these drives as an option in its flagship line matrix Symmetrix, and later using them in the line of Clariion.
Since then, SSD-drives have been adopted in the new matrix storage Sun Microsystems and Hitachi Data Systems. Toshiba and others offer them as an option in its laptops.
All the traditional hard drive vendors – Fujitsu, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, Samsung, Seagate and Western Digital – have released their products, or at least announced planah.Krome such that in 2008 they were joined by Intel, SanDisk and STEC.
Sales SSD will increase, because customers are looking for ways to improve the performance of servers and SAN, and in some cases even reduce the excess-capacity storage.
Your drive has a secret
Many long ago came to mind the thought that almost every device, bringing to a data should be encrypted, and it is finally beginning to occur in 2008
Almost every manufacturer of hard drives has added a built encryption into their memories. In 2008, Fujitsu, Hitachi GST and Seagate hard drives are offered for notebook PCs with integrated encryption and Seagate added encryption to their model of enterprise-class interface with SAS.
However, HP has added the management of the encryption key as a product to its lineup of storage, and Brocade – encryption into its SAN-connected device architecture.
BUSlink, CMS, Iomega, Seagate and others now sell removable hard drives with encryption, and your encrypted «флэшки» offer us Anywhere, CMS Peripherals and IronKey.
Time to Bet on the ISE
In 2008, the market has started a series of new products, but most of them were only the expansion of existing ones.
But one product is a new class of storage devices: it is «intelligent data storage unit» (Intelligent Storage Element), or ISE, from Xiotech.
ISE – is self-pressurized module, which includes several hard drives, controllers are reserved to the management of safety to the local management RAID, cache and disk, rezervirovanny power and cooling, as well as a battery of support with the resources up to 96 hours.
The module is capable of ISE samovosstanavlivatsya if happen any problem with the equipment without the need to remove the device and without any impact to applications and data. The company argues that only when the 30% of all resources ISE his work could be compromised.
ISE Module appeared after buying the company Xiotech Advanced Storage Architecture group at Seagate Technology in November 2007
«Musical chairs» * chiefs channel
In the 2008-meters, some key leaders of the channel changed jobs. In October, Julie Parrish, left his post of vice-president of Symantec global channels, and a month later a new vice president for NetApp global sales through the channel.
It was joined by Todd Palmer, a former member of the team CA, which became the new vice-president of NetApp channel Americas.
Ayventosh Leonard, vice president for NetApp global channels in July suddenly left the company and disappeared for three months, after which re-emerged as a vice president of global channels and OEM-partners, Isilon Systems, which is charged with the task of turning the company in vendors, focusing on the channel.
Mark Gonzalez, a former head of Hewlett-Packard, responsible for business servers and SAN with a turnover of 7.5 billion dollars in October, has been hired as the new president of Nth Generation Computing, a supplier of solutions with a turnover of 40 million dollars
Gonzales, an old friend of the administrator of Nth Generation Rich Baldwin, will assume leadership of the company, and Baldwin will focus on expanding the business, possibly through purchases.
The company LeftHand Networks have problems after coming to the end of June, Richard Shea to the post of vice-president for sales in North America. The point is that Shih left EqualLogic, its competitor to iSCSI, immediately after the company was acquired by Dell. The last is not liked, and at the end of July, she filed a lawsuit LeftHand for what is «peremanila» Shi. Source: VARBusiness