Storage Continues to make a Splash

Last week I discussed how the Burton group sees a shift away from emphasis on technologies like Capture and Storage within ECM towards technologies that alleviate ‘Information Overload’.  But these ‘first wave’ technologies are not standing still.  Expect big changes in the area of storage.

Arun Taneja has an article where he discusses some of the activity that has been brewing in the area of storage and makes some predictions about what might happen in 2007.

Taneja notes that many many storage startups began in 2000 and 2001.   Much of the new technologies that these companies worked on are now beginning to make an impact on the marketplace.  In a market where IPOs have become rare, 2006 saw four IPOs within the Storage space.  It hasn’t been since Xyratex in 2004 made an IPO as a storage company. 

• Riverbed (September 2006) — Manages ‘wide area data’ between remote offices
• Commvault (September 2006) — Unified Enterprise Backup and Recovery
• Isilon (December 2006) — Clustered Storage Solutions
• DoubleTake (December 2006) — Disaster Recovery, High Availablity and Backup

Categories of some of the other new storage players include

Storage Virtualization
Storage Virtualization allows you to aggregate multiple network storage devices and make them appear to function as a single storage device that can be centrally managed.  The technology allows backup, archiving and recovery to be handled much more easily.

Information Classification and Management (ICM) devices
ICM devices have some built-in knowledge about the unstructured data that they store.  These devices allow certain kinds of data to be identified and allow rules to be defined for how data should be managed  This promotes the capability of policy and rules-based actions and is very useful for addressing compliance and records management requirements. 

ICM devices may also directly full-text index the data stored on the device and to be able to automatically classify data and derive metadata.Some up-and-coming companies in the ICM Storage space include Kazeon, Index Engines, and Abrevity.

Storage in 2007

Taneja is predicting as many as eight to ten Storage-related IPOs in 2007 might happen, but also notes that there will be many more storage startups that haven’t yet gained traction after five to six years of development that will be sold off for their assets.