I did NAB a little differently this year: attended on Wednesday and Thursday, the last two days of the floor exhibits. Definitely easier, although many of the execs left Wednesday.

NABShow_logo

But that wasn’t a surprise. Here’s what did surprise me:

  • EMC seemed to have less of presence than in past years. I expected more.
  • HGST is pushing aggressively on its – and WD’s – systems business. They’re one to watch.
  • Thunderbolt 3 storage is definitely a thing: 40Gb/s of bandwidth essentially for free? Or 20Gb/s for even less? Of course!
  • Thunderbolt-based clusters may also be a thing. Need to learn more.
  • Several companies I hadn’t seen before: OpenIO, Quobyte, Symply, Glyph and Dynamic Drive Pool. The last had a good-sized booth and has been in business for 10 years – but I’d never heard of them.
  • Video – 4k/8k, drone, 360°, surveillance, streaming, phone – are all growing rapidly. OK, not 8k – yet.

The StorageMojo take
I’ll be writing some more about what I saw at NAB. I also asked a number of companies for briefings, including Pure.

There are some larger trends, beyond hardware, that I saw. The big one: complex storage systems are on the way out. More on that later.

Courteous comments welcome, of course.