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.
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.
Hello Robin,
… “complex storage systems are on the way out.”
Ok, I’ll bite the bait. This is intriguing because I’ve been thinking about this for years. In the last 10 years or so, I’ve seen way too many enterprises experience configuration, operational, or performance problems because storage was overly complex.
The cause mostly seemed a mix of inadequate training of SAN personnel, operationally complex storage systems, and the continuing saga of inadequate technical collaboration (communication) between the various technical staffs. The server / virtualization guys desire a particular I/O config which differs from what the storage group thinks is best or is mandated to configure.
Direct attached storage is still fast & simple, although of course still not as flexible as shared. Software to the rescue? I’ve been out of the loop on storage for about 2 years, so looking forward to the new revelation you reveal.
Chuck
Hi, There
We have a Dynamic Drive Pool here in house I think it’s mainly for firms in the video world. The DDP we have offered twice the bandwith for less then half the money AVID asked.
Now we want to move at least two storage platforms into one.
I hope we can have a Object storage solution that get rids of the LTO5 tapes and the P2000 nearline storage. I keep an eye open on OpenIO.