Storage Abounds

Dell Inc. increased its storage capabilities by acquiring Compellent Technologies, Inc. Elsewhere, Toshiba America, Inc. and Seagate Technology, LLC are launching new solid-state and traditional hard disk drives, respectively.  Lastly, a new report finds that flash-based storage may not be less prone to initial failure than traditional rotating disks.

Focal Points:

• Dell has entered an agreement with storage vendor Compellent Technologies to buy the company for $820 million, including cash on hand. Compellent earned $125 million in revenue during 2009, and has 2,500 customers and 490 employees. Dell is likely eager to close this deal given its past acquisition failure with 3Par, which ended up in Hewlett-Packard, Co.'s hands after a lengthy battle. Competition has been fierce as revenue from disk storage systems has jumped 18.5 percent and storage software sales have grown by 8.7 percent over last year. Should the sale culminate, Dell will need to integrate Compellent with its other storage acquisitions, EqualLogic and Ocarina.
• New solid-state storage drives (SSDs) aimed at enterprise applications were announced by Toshiba this week. The 2.5 inch Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives are available in 100 gigabyte (GB), 200 GB, and 400 GB capacities and supports 6 gigabit per second (Gbps) transfer speeds. Maximum sequential sustained read rates of up to 510MBps and sustained writes of up to 230MBps are achievable, according to the company. The drives are being targeted at enterprise applications including tier 0 data centers and will begin shipping in the first quarter of next year. Elsewhere in the 2.5-inch world, Seagate announced the first 7,200 RPM 1 terabyte (TB) capacity hard disk drive. The drive uses a SAS interface and has a self-encrypting drive option.
• French hardware review site Hardware.fr published a report comparing disk failure rates between traditional hard disks and SSDs. The site was given access to an online retailer's sales and return database over a 12-month period and found that SSD failure rates were slightly higher than traditional hard disks. Based on return patterns, approximately 2.05 percent of SSDs versus 1.94 percent of hard disks were returned as non-functioning. Among the best and worst individual performers, Hardware.fr found that Intel SSDs were returned at a rate of just 0.59 percent versus Hitachi's hard disks at 3.39 percent.

Experton Group believes the appetite for, and competition to, acquire vendors supplying enterprise storage hardware and software will continue for the next several years. Dell has the particular challenge of working to integrate vendors whose unique hardware and software intellectual property (IP) into their ongoing efforts to transform themselves from a provider of commodity goods to one capable of delivering cloud and transformational solutions. The company has made significant strides and is doing well with providing an atmosphere that allows its acquisitions to continue to innovate and flourish. IT executives should expect effects on both businesses to be positive. While SSDs are still more cutting edge than commonplace, the speeds and sizes available from leading manufacturers offer compelling claims to incorporate solutions in targeted areas in data center. IT executives should, at the very least, have plans to test SSDs in a variety of applications where high-speed throughput options are necessary and determine future adoptions based on performance, pricing, and relative corporate value. The Hardware.fr report on SSD versus traditional hard disk failure rates is interesting, but hardly representative enough to be conclusive. Still, it is not the only report that has circulated that calls the supposed decreased failure-rate benefits of SSDs into question. While SSDs will certainly become the mainstream play within the next five years, it is nonetheless clear from chatter in storage circles that manufacturers have work remaining in improving manufacturing techniques to increase quality.