The recession may have hit hard across almost all sectors of the economy, but one line of business that remains buoyant is that of data storage.
Fuelled by cloud computing, the ever-escalating creation of corporate data and the insatiable demand for information retention, those suppliers which are able to supply low-cost, high-performance storage subsystems that underpin efficient computing architectures continue to experience remarkable growth, despite straitened economic circumstances.
One such company is storage vendor NetApp. With the release of its second quarter results, the company has shown an increase in revenue of 33%, with US$1.207 billion compared to $910 million for the same period a year ago.
NetApp South Africa country manager Mike Styer says this growth reflects the fact that storage systems that are part and parcel of the cloud computing environment are far more than a simple `bunch of disks`.
"While NetApp has seen remarkable growth, not every storage company has. That`s because the buyers of storage capacity today know that they need more than terabytes and petabytes. They also need that capacity to be made available in the efficient, virtualised architecture that is an integral aspect of cloud computing systems."
Styer draws attention to a recent Gartner Group report, which indicates that worldwide, the market for external controller-based disk storage market grew 21.4% in the second quarter of 2010 ("Quarterly Statistics: Disk Array Storage, All Regions, All Countries, 2Q10 Update.") He also notes that Gartner has positioned NetApp in its `Leaders quadrant` for Storage Resource Management and SAN Management Software; Gartner asserts that vendors in this quadrant "have the highest combined measures of ability to execute and completeness of vision".
While underlying physical hardware is obviously essential, the magic lies in the software, Styer continues. "People are rethinking IT infrastructure and evaluating alternatives to cope with the new realities of business growth and pace. There is a sense of urgency to act now and move from a siloed infrastructure to a shared one that is more efficient and flexible in addressing rapidly evolving business requirements. It is through platform features, products, and technologies which combine hardware and software that the transition is made to flexible and efficient shared IT infrastructures, which are the foundation for cloud computing," he says.
More customers are turning to NetApp as their storage platform as they seek this greater flexibility and efficiency; Styer says that with its unified architecture and systems portfolio, the company`s solutions are expressly designed for the cloud. "For example, the NetApp Data ONTAP 8 operating system combines all virtualised workloads to deliver with the lowest storage TCO. It pulls SAN, NAS, FC, SATA, iSCSI, FCoE, and Ethernet into a single platform; that`s exactly what cloud computing needs in order to achieve complete efficiency from all storage resources."
Additionally, NetApp DataMotion for Volumes allows customers to move large volumes of data without disrupting their business operations; again, Styer says this is among the key benefits associated with cloud computing. "This is what flexibility in cloud computing means: the ability to shift resources to where they are needed, without any hassle."
And since volumes of information continue to expand, he says new NetApp inline data compression can be used alone or with deduplication to help dramatically reduce the amount of storage needed and improve storage efficiency.
On the back of these and other data storage technologies, Styer says even as the `data explosion` continues, companies are able to cope with high-efficiency, low-cost storage. "And as a result, too, NetApp continues to enjoy strong prospects for growth, with estimated revenue for the third quarter of fiscal year 2011 to be in the range of $1.240 billion to $1.290 billion, which equates to approximately 3% to 7% sequential revenue growth and approximately 23% to 28% year over," he concludes.
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