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.

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.

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.

Oracle reported that image clones are a completely new virtual disk object, independent units that can have new lives of their own.

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.

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.

The industry hasnt hit the storage capacity ceiling on hard drives, although there are definitely limits.

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.

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.

Apple needed more room for its iTunes franchise, so it figured EMCs 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!