GLG News by Mr. Thomas Coughlin, President
GLG News is now G+ Insights
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STEC racks up additional qualifications for enterprise SSDs
May 27, 2009
STEC wins Fujitsu for its SSDs | www.theregister.co.uk
* Fujitsu is reported to have choosen STEC as its solid state drive supplier * STEC has had success at several storage system providers offering solid state storage for enterprise applications * Prior STEC qualifications include IBM and EMC * STEC is now the leading supplier of SSD for enterprise applications
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Consumer electronics storage offers promise of renewed growth
May 26, 2009
On-Line Data Storage to Surge | itmanagement.earthweb.com
* A recovery in the consumer electronics market is expected by 2011 * By 2014 expected content stored in the average US home is estimated at 12 TB * Roughly half of this 12 TB is backups and user generated content * Some consumer storage categories will experience growth even in recessionary times, such as external storage * 900 Exabytes of storage capacity for consumer applications is expected to be shipped in 2014
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Netbook computers create new computer distribution and use models
May 25, 2009
Verizon Wireless to sell HP Netbook Computers | www.reuters.com
* Netbook computers are expected to experience exceptional growth in 2009 due to their low cost and great convenience * Low cost computers with network connectivity seem like a good fit with a service provider market where hardware is sold at a discount to promote monthly fees * Verizon has indicated that it will sell HP netbook computers for $199.99 after a $50 rebate and a two year broadband wireless contract * Such offerings could be a good marketing approach to increasing netbook sales and thus driving the popularity of these products
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Inexpensive mobile computers satisfy market need and drive continued storage demand
May 25, 2009
One in Five Laptops Shipped in Q1 Was a Netbook | www.informationweek.com
* About 40 million laptops were estimated to have shipped in CQ1. Of these about 20% were netbooks * Sale of netbook computers prevented unit sales loss of less than 3% vs. the first quarter of 2008 * The increasing percentage of low cost netbooks is lowering the ASP for notebook computers in general * Acer is the market leader in the netbook market with roughly 30% market share * Reports indicate that over 90% of netbooks sold use HDDs instead of SSDs
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April 14, 2009
Western Digital Wades into Solid State | newsfeedresearcher.com
* Western Digital is the number 2 HDD company, after Seagate * WD has weathered the current economic situation better than many companies due to its focus on low cost HDD production * Western Digital has not made any forays into the solid state storage market until this purchase * Although Silicon Systems primary market focus is on embedded industrial and military type applications WD should learn a lot about flash products through this acquisition
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Expanding Options for Storing Content in the Clouds
April 14, 2009
Netscape alums tackle cloud storage | www.networkworld.com
* A bright spot in storage in cloud computing where companies can either implement their own systems for storing content on the internet or lease on-line storage * There are a growing number of cloud vendors offering private or public storage on the Internet * Zetta, is a start up company with several founders from Netscape that is providing web-based storage * Zetta competes against already established cloud storage offerings such as Amazon’s Simple Storage Services.
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Standards are Crucial to SSD Adoption
April 14, 2009
Solid-State in the Enterprise: Raising Standards | www.techcrunchit.com
* The enterprise market is one of the brightest niches for solid state drives SSDs can be used in enterprise Tier 0 applications where fast reading (and writing) can enable important content delivery and transaction applications * These Tier 0 enterprise applications allow faster creation and use of content, thus increases overall demand for digital storage capacity * Although many companies have introduced SSD products for the enterprise market only a few of these have gained market share * Without creating standards for SSD products the growth of SSDs in the enterprise market will be hampered.
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New consumer devices may eventually replace books with storage and display
February 11, 2009
Amazon Raises an E-Book Specter | online.wsj.com
* Both Sony and Amazon as well as a few other companies such as Team Research have introduced e-book readers * These devices use a technology called e-ink to display text, this is a low power display since power is only used when pages are changed * Amazon just introduced a new generation of e-book reader that can store up to 1,500 books on flash memory and with a better resolution display * As the displays improve and storage capacities increase these devices may be able to give good illustration displays as well as text * Within the next five years we may see a revolution in how we handle and display text and printed material due to such devices
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Slumping PC sales will impact storage and memory component sales
February 10, 2009
Sales of PCs to fall for the first time in eight years | www.ft.com
* The last quarter of 2008 saw sales of PCs plummet vs. expectations * IDC is now projecting that PC sales for 2009 could show a decline over 2008, the first year over year decline since 2001 * There are indications that 2009 PC sales will decline faster than anticipated by IDC, including sales in developing countries and corporate buyers * Microsoft is getting ready for an early launch of its Windows 7 platform (perhaps by July) which may spur some PC sales but perhaps benefiting less powerful machines such as netbooks
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Economic slump will hit storage device market in 2009
February 10, 2009
Coughlin Predicts Dead Hard Drive Bounce | www.storagesearch.com
* Hard disk drives have an average unit growth rate of about 15% per year although the actual percentage growth per year can vary * Up until Q3 2008 the HDD industry looked to be heading for about 14% unit growth year over year * Q4 2008 HDD unit shipments was down about 19% over Q3 2008 leading to a total annual unit growth rate of only 7.8% from 2007 * With the current economic conditions it appears likely that 2009 HDD shipments will contract by 5% to 9% with a 7% contraction very likely * Long term demand for digital storage capacity continues and will likely lead to a significant recovery in HDD shipments (20-35% annual growth) when the economy can support it (2011?)
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Will Blu-ray life be short lived?
February 10, 2009
Blu-ray Set to Drive Home Video Growth, Study Finds | www.cepro.com
* Blu-ray products are showing slower adoption due to higher prices than DVDs in a recessionary environment * In December 2008 Blu-ray content titles sold about 16% of DVD title sales (according to Panasonic at the 2009 Storage Visions Conference) * Blu-ray will face increasing competition from video on demand using high speed internet, limiting long term growth * Blu-ray is expected to hit 59.7 % market share and $13.1 B revenue by 2014 and 73.8 % market share and $15.6 B by 2017 * Higher resolution content may be required by 2015 or so to continue the use of physical media distribution vs. on-line distribution
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January 27, 2009
Western Digital about to ship 2TB Caviar Green hard drive? | queensspeech.com
* Seagate has been shipping a 1.5 TB HDD since the fourth quarter of 2008 * WD is said to be just about to announce a 2 TB HDD, the first 3.5-inch HDD with such storage capacities * With a 1 TB HDD first introduced at the beginning of 2007 this indicates that the rate of increase in HDD capacities is about 50% annually * The WD drive is the Caviar Green 2,000 GB WD20EADS and will be offered in 7,300 or 5,400 RPM * With a similar storage density growth we might expect 4 TB HDDs by 2011 and 8 TB HDDs by 2013
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Fujitsu seems ready to throw in the towel on HDDs
January 27, 2009
Toshiba in talks to buy Fujitsu unit | www.ft.com
* Fujitsu is a long time manufacturer of hard disk drives, providing technology leadership in several markets for several years * Fujitsu is second to Seagate in the highest margin enterprise HDD business and also provides 2.5-inch form factor HDDs for the laptop market * Toshiba and Fujitsu are involved in serious talks about merging Fujitsu’s HDD business with Toshiba’s HDD business * With this merger the combined Toshiba HDD operation could become the leading provider of 2.5-inch HDDs for the laptop computer market * Toshiba is a leader in flash memory development as well as building small form factor 2.5-inch and 1.8-inch form factor disk drives
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Changing of the Guard at Seagate
January 27, 2009
Ousted Seagate CEO provocative to the end | money.cnn.com
* Seagate technology announced that CEO William Watkins is being replaced by Steven Luczo who led the company prior to Watkin’s elevation in 2004 * David Wickersham, President and COO was also let go, replaced by Robert Whitmore, who has been CTO * Seagate has suffered from a couple of years of mis-steps in hard disk drive introductions and lost market share, particularly to Western Digital in many markets * Seagate is cutting costs, eliminating employees and trying to figure out how to recover its technology lead and regain market share
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Flash Memory as a Content Distribution Media, Part 2
January 27, 2009
CES: SanDisk Unveils Gen 3 SSDs for $149 to $499: $99 Combo MP3 Player/FM Radio, “SlotRadio” | blogs.barrons.com
* SanDisk announced their slot music product using micro-SD cards for music distribution in 2008. * At the 2009 CES SanDisk announced their SlotRadio product (MSRP $99) that extended SD-based content distribution to a random play device with popular music content * SanDisk offers a SlotRadio player with a micro-SD slot. * The player comes with a pre-loaded micro-SD card with 1,000 top Billboard songs from several genres * Users can decide to play songs at random within a genre from the card and additional cards with Billboard songs can be purchased for $39 for 1,000 more songs—this come out to about $0.04 per song * This is SanDisk’s second try at flash-based content distribution, they introduced the Gruvi player 3 years ago, that never took off
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Trusted Storage Touches Enterprise Products
December 16, 2008
Trusted Storage for Enterprise-class Hard Disk Drives | esj.com
* Encrypted hard disk drives have begun to appear in the laptop market using encryption built into 2.5-inch HDDs * Working with multiple internally encrypted HDDs in an enterprise environment requires key management to deal effectively with the drive encryption keys * The Trusted Computing Group specifications in combination with IEEE 1619 key management specifications help provide security for enterprise applications * It is expected that encrypted storage devices in the enterprise environment will become more common in the next few years as a way to protect valuable content
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The World is full of the Corpses of Failed Global Conquest
December 15, 2008
Flash Makers Will Need $1 Trillion To Take Over the Disk Drive Storage Market, Skeptic Says | techpulse360.com
* The replacement of one technology by another is drive by economic factors among which is the cost of building manufacturing facilities * HDDs manufactured in 2008 probably will have provided over 100 Exabytes of total new storage, all the flash memory produced in 2008 probably amounts to only a few Petabytes and much less capacity shipped in SSDs * Flash manufacturing fabs are very expensive and HDD manufacturing plants are very efficient and cost effective * Economic as well as technical factors will make it difficult to SSDs to take over all the applications where HDDs are used. * It is more likely that global conquest over HDDs by SSDs will not occur but that SSDs will be popular in some niche markets at least in the near term
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A Marriage of Mutual Advantage
December 11, 2008
Hitachi, Intel to Co-Design High-End SSDs | www.pcmag.com
* Hitachi Global Storage Technology (HGST) is the third leading manufacturer of enterprise HDDs * Intel announced a family of high performance, low overhead solid state drives last Summer * Intel’s current products do not include enterprise SAS or Fibre Channel interface SSDs * HGST and Intel have reached a 4 year agreement to manufacture enterprise SSDs sold by HGST * Using this approach HGST may beat Seagate Technology and Fujitsu in introducing enterprise class SSDs to the market
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December 11, 2008
Japan’s Fujitsu Seeks Buyer for Hard-Disk-Drive Business | online.wsj.com
* Fujitsu is the number 2 supplier of enterprise HDDs, behind Seagate but ahead of HGST* Fujitsu also supplies 2.5-inch drives for the notebook market* Fujitsu has been rumored to be in talks to sell the HDD unit for many months since the unit has been losing money* Several companies are interested in Fujitsu, including Western Digital and Toshiba* If Western Digital purchased Fujitsu they would acquire an enterprise business stake that they currently don’t have
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October 21, 2008
HP Jilts Intel SSDs | www.theregister.co.uk
* HP hailed Intel’s entry into SSDs announced at the IDF in August * HP announced that they have selected Samsung SSDs for their virtualization blade server system * The Samsung SSDs in this application replace 2.5-inch hard disk drives * HP says that use of SSDs in this application allows faster performing blade servers * The SSDs will server for local booting and “scratch” storage for the blade server units
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