The worldwide mainframe disk array market is going to zoom past $3,400m next year, according to Jim Porter. But by 1998 it will have fallen nearly 20% to $2,750m and it looks as if it will be downhill from there. And EMC Corp, which outsold IBM Corp in the mainframe array market last year, is probably going to keep its lead for a while. Porter heads Disk/Trend Inc, in Mountain View, California, a consulting firm that everybody in the disk business recognises as the pre-eminent source of market research and analysis. His most recent analysis and forecast, The 1995 Disk/Trend Report on Disk Drive Arrays, covers the market for clustered disks used in every kind of system from personal computers through servers and mainframes and on up to supercomputers.
New controller
A considerable part of the report’s 350 or so pages is devoted to listings of array products, but the part of the book the industry studies with greatest interest is the quantitative analysis Disk/Trend provides. If Porter is right, IBM is simply not going to supply the majority of mainframe disk arrays and it may not even be able to boast the largest market share. EMC looks like the strongest of the vendors, while the other powerful players, Hitachi Data Systems Inc and Storage Technology Corp, will only add to IBM’s woes. In the analytical essays that accompany the statistical presentation, Porter cites the limitation of IBM’s disk controllers as a significant factor in IBM’s difficulties and he predicts that IBM will have not only new disk arrays next year but a new controller, too. Porter, whose audience is in the disk manufacturing industry, does not delve into some of the issues that are of considerable import to end users and leasing companies, such as the residual values arrays are likely to retain over the years. But the implications for IBM’s current 3990 controllers and Ramac arrays are pretty clear and not very cheerful. Porter says the most dramatic growth in the array business will be in the server segment, where prices are falling fast but storage requirements are growing at a pace that more than offsets that decline. Whether or not mainframe users move their core databases to non-mainframe servers, that is apparently what the rest of the world is doing. We heartily recommend Porter’s report to anyone who plans to make a significant investment in disk arrays. It costs $1,350, which would alternatively buy you less than half a Gigabyte of Ramac capacity. The report is also available on disk (of course) and there are significant discounts for buyers of multiple copies or those who get more than one of the firm’s reports, such as the hard drive or optical disk studies. Disk/Trend can be reached at phone (415) 961-6209, fax (415) 969-2560. – Hesh Wiener From Infoperspective International, June 1995 Copyright (C) 1995 Technology News Ltd.
