Commentary

Terry Sweeney
 

The Temperature Of Storage

Why can't I look away from the morning weather report, or just turn the page when I come across the odds-makers' lines on the sports section? Maybe it's the control freak in me. Or that I want to believe some mere mortal really knows how this will all turn out. Maybe I just want information, even if it's deemed reliable but not guaranteed. I try to remember all this as I read the temperature taking going on in the storage industry, against a backdrop of bankruptcies, foreclosures, and record energy prices.

Why can't I look away from the morning weather report, or just turn the page when I come across the odds-makers' lines on the sports section? Maybe it's the control freak in me. Or that I want to believe some mere mortal really knows how this will all turn out. Maybe I just want information, even if it's deemed reliable but not guaranteed.

I try to remember all this as I read the temperature taking going on in the storage industry, against a backdrop of bankruptcies, foreclosures, and record energy prices.Kaushik Roy of Pacific Growth Equities this week found a silver lining outside the U.S., pointing to strong revenue in Europe and the Middle East; the strength of the euro currency also will help storage vendors here, he adds, in an investment note from Monday.


More Storage Insights

White Papers

More >>

Reports

More >>

Webcasts

More >>

"April is looking fine, but we are not sure how things might shape up in May and June. As such, we believe that companies could be very cautious with their CQ2 guidance. Nonetheless, we do not believe that companies who provide yearly guidance (such as IBM, EMC, etc.) will cut C2008 guidance when they report CQ1," he wrote.

Likewise, overall IT spending appears to be holding up OK, and "enterprise storage seems to be doing slightly better than other segments of IT, primarily driven by data growth, regulatory compliance, increased priority of disaster/recovery, and business continuity plans by SMBs," Roy added.

I like his cautious optimism, and was even happy to hear about the strength of the euro for the first time, uhh, ever.

R.W. Baird's Jayson Nolan did his own temperature taking at the Storage Networking World show in Orlando this past week. He pointed to Ethernet and solid state drives (SSDs) as technologies to stay focused on, and views vendors' energy savings efforts as cause for his own cautious optimism.

"Though the push for 'Green' is unlikely to drive incremental spend given constrained IT budgets, we believe power and cost savings metrics will be an increasingly important differentiator for vendors," Nolan wrote in an e-mail this week. "Some key technologies to achieve these outcomes are server virtualization, data deduplication, and blade-based systems (footprint reduction)."

Like meteorology, economic forecasting claims to be a science; it's just not always a reliable one. So whether we're talking about rain or RAID, it's smart to remember the last word can only be had in retrospect.


Related Reading




Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

InformationWeek encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, InformationWeek moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. InformationWeek further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
T-Shirt Giveaway T-Shirt Giveaway: Each week we're selecting one great comment from our readers. The author of the comment will receive an InformaitonWeek Community t-shirt. So get posting!
Subscribe to RSS

Resource Links