Sun makes storage market gains

Judi Hasson — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 21:22:43 -0400

Sun Microsystems has moved ahead of international competitors like Hitachi Data Systems and Fujitsu with its new Open Storage systems, according to IDC's Worldwide Disk Storage Systems Quarterly Tracker. The report said Sun moved into fifth place on the world chart with $494 million in sales, or 7 percent of the market. Sun recorded a 29.2 percent year-over-year increase in factory revenue for the second quarter, far outperforming the overall market, eWeek.com reported.

The report also noted that the Sun strategy is to keep increasing the number of its open-source oriented OpenSolaris/Zettabyte File System storage offerings to help fuel enterprise interest. Hewlett Packard remained the revenue leader with $1.25 billion in quarterly sales and control of 20.3 percent of the market. IBM was second with a 19.1 percent market share for $1.23 billion.

"Despite concerns about a 2008 slowdown in IT spending, external disk storage systems spending experienced strong growth in the first half of 2008," Natalya Yezhkova, a research manager for Storage Systems at IDC said in a statement.

For more on storage:
- see this eWeek.com article

Cost of operating data centers rises

Judi Hasson — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:21:43 -0400

The energy costs of operating data centers are high, and on the rise. IDC forecasts that IT spending required just to cool and power spinning disk drives will reach $1.8 billion by the end of this year, and over $2 billion in 2009. IDC also estimated that more than 49 million hard disk drives in external storage arrays were in use by businesses around the world last year, with corporate customers boosting storage capacity by an aggregate rate of 50 percent a year. One solution to this vexing problem may be NAND flash-based solid-state storage that offers a power-saving substitute over physical spinning drives. Hewlett-Packard Co., Sun Microsystems Inc. and EMC Corp. all have plans to add solid-state across their server portfolios.

For more on this new option:
- check out this Computerworld.com article

External Storage

Sun makes storage market gains

Cost of operating data centers rises