The thing about predictions is they are predictable. Often they turn out as expected or predicted. That’s the way with all the predictions for 2010 I’ve read in blogs in the last few weeks. So now if things are predictable or expected, here are my predictions for 2010 in the world of storage.
1. EMC will acquire another company: While the acquisition won’t be the magnitude of Data Domain, it will happen. EMC has not gone without an acquisition in 11 years. Starting in 1999, EMC acquired 1999 Data General and Softworks; in 2000 it acquired CrosStor; 2001 FilePool; 2002 Prisa Networks; 2003 Astrum, Legato, Documentum and VMware; 2004 Dantz, Allocity and SMARTS; 2005 Maranti, Rainfinity, Acartus and Captiva; 2006 Acxion, Internosis, Authentica, Kashya, Interlink Group, nLayers, ProActivity, RSA, Neartek, Network Intelligence, Infoscape and Avamar; 2007 Valyd, Verid, Geniant, X-Hive, Tablus, BusinessEdge, Berkeley Data Systems, Voyence and Document Science; 2009 Pi, Infra, Conchango and Iomega; and, finally in 2009 ConfigureSoft, Data Domain, FastScale and Kazeon. 45 acquisions in all — that’s why it’s predictable that the storage giant will add another company to its cache this year.
[Editor’s note: After this story was published, EMC announced it signed a definitive agreement to acquire Kansas-based Archer Technologies, a privately-held, provider of governance, risk and compliance software. Archer says it has client list that includes one in four of the Fortune 100.]
2. Storage capacity will grow: The storage administrators we talk to say that their storage needs are doubling every 18 months. I expect that expenditures will be for Serial ATA disk to store unstructured data.
3. IDC and Gartner will predict that EMC will lead in market share for external storage: As has happened in the past five years, EMC has led in external storage, followed by IBM, HP and Dell in no apparent order.
4. Virtualization will be hot again: Storage and server virtualization. which are inevitably linked, will be a hot topic again this year as more companies virtualize their servers with VMware or Hyper-V. The disaster recovery of these systems will be the reason d’etre for virtualizing servers.
5. So will ‘green’ topics: In the recovering economy, saving CAPEX and OPEX by adopting green technologies in the data center will be paramount. Whether it means using solid state drives, or adopting Fibre Channel over Ethernet, both technologies which consume less energy, watch for more green initiatives this year.
Take all of these predictions with a grain of salt and with the humor intended. Let’s see at the end of the year how many of them have come true — I’ll predict that all of them will.