Cisco takes on the video tsunami

Cisco’s medianet will transport the content, but who will store it?

Cisco’s medianet initiative is a network response to the video-rich world that is evolving at break-neck speed. 

I’ve posted on this trend frequently because the effect on storage surpasses the network transformation Cisco sees coming. 

Cisco will be temporarily touching the bytes of content as they move around, but where will they come to rest? The storage industry will need to step up to the plate to ensure this wave of new content has a place to land.

Hip hop meets bits and bytes

Stack the memory! Check it:

ZDNet sees a trend here.

Reminds me of the Smirnoff Tea Partay

How much does a terabyte weigh?

From under a pound to 300,000 pounds, depending on your media

• On paper: 300,000 pounds (30 million sheets)
• On 3.5″ floppies: 30,000 pounds (830,000 disks)
• On CDs: 175 pounds (1,250 discs)
• On two 2006-era disk drives: 5.6 pounds
• On one FreeAgent desktop drive: 2.8 pounds
• On two FreeAgent Go drives: 0.8 pounds

In the video, I was off by a factor of ten on the height of the one terabyte stack of paper: it would be about 2 1/2 miles tall.

You might wonder what a terabyte will weigh in ten years.  Answer: it won’t matter.  You’ll want to know what a petabyte weighs by then.

16 reasons digital content will grow through the Great Recession

1. HD broadcast/media is going mainstream.  HD video takes 4 times the space of SD video on PCs, DVRs and the web infrastructure. 

2. Higher fidelity music downloads.  Apple and others race to make their music “better”, which means more megabytes per song.

3. Change in the personal media consumption model from “play” to “record”. We used to listen to phone messages, watch TV and play music.  Now we archive emails, collect videos online and build a music library.

4. The expanding digital class in Brazil, Russia, India and China. Most of the planet’s population is in countries where millions of digital consumers will be created even in tough times.

5. Microsoft Vista traction. Vista is finally becoming the dominant OS. It’s a catalyst for consumer and business content.

6. Growth in home backup storage.  Mainstream consumers are finally fearing the “digital housefire” enough to back up their PCs to external storage and online services.

7. Increasing mobile content consumption. iPhone and its peers multiply mobile video consumption, creating even more video to be kept somewhere.

8. Photo de-compression. More people are keeping their photos in “raw” format, taking up magnitudes more space. And megapixels continue to grow.

9. Increase in video downloads and views. Hulu.com, iTunes and Amazon Unbox are increasing video consumption for the web massses, which drives consumer and infrastructure storage.

10. The monetization of content. The 99 Cent Song and the Ten Dollar Movie have us all equating our content with cash, driving new demand to store and protect it more like money. That creates more copies.

11. Shift from data centers to the storage cloud.  More efficient business storage models drive an increase in business content.

12. Server virtualization. “Free” servers are causing a huge increase in data center storage to support them.

13. Video surveillance.  A behind-the-scenes digital video generator that is challenging HD consumer content in size and growth.

14. Increased use of data reduction practices like de-duplication. It’s not intuitive, but there’s evidence that more efficient content results in more, not less, content.

15. Increased financial regulation. The technological result will be more data saved for longer periods, and not just by banks.

16. More companies complying with information regulation. SOX and HIPAA data regulations are finally getting legs, driving more companies to store more to comply.

Digital content is no longer a discretionary item.  That’s just as true for consumers as for businesses.  Content and the storage to keep It will grow through whatever economic disruption awaits us in the coming year or two.

Storage in my living room

490 gigabytes today, but just wait till my old TV dies…

I added up all the digital content (and storage) in my living room: 373 gigabytes.  I also calculated the digital equivalent of all of my analog movies, music and photos: an additional 96 GB, for a total of 490 GB. 

One thing became very clear: DVDs and home videos dominate the stash.   We’re on a pretty strict Netflix regimen, so we only own 22 DVDs.  Still they accounted for 40% of all of our digital content.

My terabyte future

When my TV finally kicks the bucket, watch out!  I’ve got big dreams for Entertainment System 2.0, including terabytes of movies at the ready.  The challenge will be to make sense of all the technology options to arrive at a system that works and lasts.

Bill Watkins on FreeAgent

More video + more unprotected content = new products

Seagate CEO Bill Watkins spent 3 1/2 minutes with MarketWatch talking about the new FreeAgent line and consumer storage trends. Two takeaways:

1. It’s all about video.  This is a recurring trend here at Storage Effect.  When Seagate developed a storage calculator for PCs, it was immediately clear that video swamped all other forms of content for consumer storage.
2. People aren’t backing up their content.  Bill said 17% of U.S. consumers aren’t backing up their content.  Is this a “sub-prime mortgage” kind of thing where people don’t realize the risk they’re taking?  I think it’s more that they just don’t know how exactly, and it’s not at the top of the list in a busy world.

Takeaway 1 will eventually overcome Takeaway 2.  Hopefully it happens via easier-to-use products like FreeAgent and not as a response to a painful content loss.

Home surveillance has a big future

This could rival home entertainment for generating digital content

Just saw a pitch for Sentinel2, a surveillance system for homes and small businesses.  From the way its manufacturer SVAT talks about it, you’d swear it would be on the shelves at Best Buy with the flat screens and BluRay gear.  This product and others like it are designed for the mass consumer market.

Most interesting: the Sentinel2 has a Seagate 160GB SV35 hard drive inside.  That’s twice the capacity in my admittedly long-in-the-tooth Tivo system. 

160 gigabytes in a product targeted at the consumer mass market…this has the looks of a storage killer app!  That is, if SVAT et al are successful in getting us to adopt this latest new gadget.

I just found SVAT’s Sentinel1 on Amazon.com…I guess it wouldn’t surprise me to see it at Best Buy after all.

Video tour of Maxtor CentralAxis

Home storage: an alternative to home servers?

 

Here’s a video tour of the Maxtor CentralAxis from Seagate.  It’s an interesting alternative to a home server without the complexity. 

Centralized, intelligent home storage that plays content everywhere.  A candidate for Keeper of the Content in the home market?

Let’s hear from you…CentralAxis vs. a home server?

The real reason storage demand keeps growing

Content drives storage, but the reverse is partially true

There’s no doubt the developments I listed in Friday’s post are enabling storage growth.  But they are mostly just removing the speed bumps impeding the real driver. 

With apologies to Bill Clinton, “It’s the content, stupid.” 

Without a purpose, all that impressive technology would sit on the shelf.  Here are the real reasons storage demand will continue unabated:

1. Broader use of content.  Hundreds of millions of additional people are using digital content in their daily lives due to developing global economies and new all-digital infrastructures.
2. Richer content.  Each file, video, image and message continues to grow in size.  High definition video is single-handedly transforming storage in the home by quadrupling the storage space required by digital collectors.
3. Increasing value of content.  Content is now worth real money to businesses and consumers alike.  This changes everything, as digital content is now bought, sold, collected, protected, and produced as evidence in legal matters, just like other financial instruments.

It’s tempting to think that the storage industry is luring new customers with dazzling storage technology.  The truth is they’re scrambling to keep up with customer demands for a good place to keep all their stuff.

Seagate: over 1 billion served

Widespread video consumption will bring the next billion within five years 

It’s a proud day for Seagate. 

Today the company announced it has shipped its one billionth disk drive. There’s a fun video stroll through the 29 years of Seagate’s existence on the website.  I was in high school for drive #1- it seems like just yesterday!

More amazing: the 2 billionth drive will ship within 5 years.  How can that be, given how capacious drives are today? 

One word: video.  There are several interlocking trends driving the sustained explosion in content needing to be stored in our world, but video rises above all else in explaining it.  I posted on this not too long ago.