While new mobile devices, the cloud and security often grabbed the biggest headlines in 2011, data storage—both on-site and off-site—also made its share of headlines. Storage media is the home base for all our data, in whatever form. The advancements in various types of media, cloud systems, management software and dataflow accelerators—there is a long list of subsets—make the sector more important than ever in the computer industry, even if the technology is often taken for granted. The significance and impact of storage technology was demonstrated best of all by storage product shortages caused by the weather–in terms of flooding in Thailand and how it is affecting the production of hard drives. Looking back at 2011 through a data storage lens, eWEEK saw few dull moments. This slide show presents, in somewhat of an order of importance, the most significant storage news stories of 2011.
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November: Thailand Floods Significantly Impact HDD Industry
Record rainstorms and flooding in Thailand—a region that assembles about 70 percent of the world's HDDs—caused a flooding disaster that hit the world IT supply chain harder than the March 2011 Japanese tsunami. As a result, there are now massive shortages of hard disks in the first quarter of 2012.
August: HP Banks Heavily on Autonomy for Unstructured Big Data Help
Hewlett-Packard spent $11 billion for Autonomy, a software company that knows how to handle big data in an enterprise, tipping off important future direction for the world's largest IT company.
October: Dell and EMC Get a Storage Divorce
Following a complicated 10-year partnership that was to run until 2013, Dell revealed that it had officially discontinued reselling all EMC storage products two years early. With its acquisitions of EqualLogic and Compellent, the partnership didn't make sense for Dell anymore.
August: Virtual Machine Cloning: New Alternative to Snapshots
Oracle reported that image clones are a completely new virtual disk object, independent units that can have new lives of their own.
August: Newcomer Box.com Moves Into Tier 1 Partnerships
Box.com struck partnership deals with VMware, EMC, Samsung and NetSuite, among others. Box.com, a rapidly growing cloud services company, is now operating in the rarified air of top-tier IT companies with these bold new deals. The company already has 8 million users in a mere three years of operation.
April: Seagate Buys Samsung's HDD Franchise for $1.38 Billion
Seagate, which owned 29 percent of the world's hard disk drive market coming into the Samsung deal and now will own 40 percent, jumped back into the market-share ballgame against Western Digital.
September: Seagate, Hitachi Come Out with 1TB Platters
The industry hasn’t hit the storage capacity ceiling on hard drives, although there are definitely limits.
March: Western Digital Acquires Hitachi Storage for $4.3 Billion
Hitachi Global Storage, a division of Hitachi Ltd., was the world's third-largest hard drive maker. Western Digital and Seagate are now clearly the world HDD leaders.
August: PCIe Flash Goes Mainstream
The NAND flash-powered PCIe interface (championed by Intel, Fusion i-o and a few others) is becoming dominant in the enterprise solid-state disk market, with unit shipments greater than the combined shipments of its SAS and Fibre Channel counterparts expected in 2012.
April: Apple Puts Isilon on the Map With 12PB Order
Apple needed more room for its iTunes franchise, so it figured EMC’s newly acquired Isilon unit (for $225 million in 2010) could provide it. With more and more people putting up their music and video into the cloud, 12PB was necessary. Now THAT made a tidy commission for some sales person or team!
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See All Slideshows
While new mobile devices, the cloud and security often grabbed the biggest headlines in 2011, data storage—both on-site and off-site—also made its share of headlines. Storage media is the home base for all our data, in whatever form. The advancements in various types of media, cloud systems, management software and dataflow accelerators—there is a long list of subsets—make the sector more important than ever in the computer industry, even if the technology is often taken for granted. The significance and impact of storage technology was demonstrated best of all by storage product shortages caused by the weather–in terms of flooding in Thailand and how it is affecting the production of hard drives. Looking back at 2011 through a data storage lens, eWEEK saw few dull moments. This slide show presents, in somewhat of an order of importance, the most significant storage news stories of 2011.