2005: The B&S Report Card

Years end is a time when many people look forward to the future. But, navel-gazers that we are here at Byte and Switch, we have decided to take a look back over the trends of the last 12 months and see how they compare with the predictions we made a year ago. (See 2005 Top Ten: Trends to Watch.)

As you'll see, our record's a bit mixed -- we got some right and we missed others. But in the compliant spirit of Sarbanes-Oxley, we thought we'd hold ourselves publicly accountable. We're awarding ourselves a Thumbs Up for the calls we got right (or at least came darned close on), and a Thumbs Down for those where... well, we could have done better.

No. 10: Funding Still Flows

There is still no shortage of money flowing into storage and grid startups, but, as we predicted, the VC market in 2005 has not been as buoyant in 2004. After a slow start, things picked up later in the year, which ended with around 40 startups pulling in well over $500 million. (See Storage Startups Surge and More Alternative Funding.) Funding, however, was definitely spread more thinly than 2004, when 30 firms shared around $600 million in VC capital.

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Funding stories from 2005 include:

No. 9: IPO No Shows

The IT industry may be emerging from an economic slowdown, but 2005 remained a slow market for IPOs. Byte and Switch last year identified a slew of companies as being ripe for IPO in 2005, including AppIQ Corp., BlueArc Corp., CommVault Systems Inc., EqualLogic Inc., and Xiotech Corp., none of which actually went public. Others firms, too, either shelved or dropped their IPO plans, including Egenera and Engenio. (See Egenera Waits on IPO and Engenio Lowers Its Sights.) We were too bullish on this one, and the economic climate, it seems, is still not right for storage firms to be floated. (See Poll: Economic Outlook Dodgy.)

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IPO stories from 2005 include:

No. 8: 4-Gig Steps Forth... Sort Of

There was plenty of talk about 4-Gbit/s gear in 2005 as vendors launched a slew of new products, although not everyone feels that the technology will be the next big thing. Some suppliers, including Engenio Information Technologies Inc. and QLogic Corp., say they're hot. EMC Corp. says they're not. But, as we predicted last year, users are starting to think about moving up from 2-Gbit/s Fibre Channel. A Byte and Switch poll conducted earlier this year found that around a third of organizations have deployed the technology, and nearly a quarter are testing the technology. Many users, however, say they are still waiting for major storage systems vendors to flesh out their 4-Gbit/s strategies. (See Fun With 4-Gig.)

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4-Gig stories from 2005 include:

No.7: Is Small Beautiful?

Despite plenty of hype in 2004, the small and medium business (SMB) market didn’t really take off in 2005. Analyst firm IDC reported earlier this year, for example, that relatively little external storage revenue was coming from SMBs. (See IDC: High-End SAN Revs Up.) Nonetheless, vendors such as EMC, Microsoft, and Symantec, continued to aim low with their storage products throughout this past year, in the hope of breaking into the SMB market. Whether low-end businesses will open the door and start spending will remain an open questions for 2006.

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SMB stories from 2005 include:

No.6: IP SANs Surge

Well, at least that’s what we thought in 2004. But, just a year later, try telling that to StoneFly users. With the knowledge of hindsight, we may have been too anxious to play this technology as the Fibre Channel slayer. Essentially, IP SANs are just an alternative, and one that all the major players have adopted or acquired. Microsoft's free iSCSI Initiator might have portended otherwise, but it looks like this is a revolution still waiting to happen, despite some strong performances from LeftHand, EqualLogic and SANRad.

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IP SAN stories from 2005 include:

No.5: Virtual Insanity

Here's another technology with a question mark hanging over it, and we'll admit to getting a little swept up in the hype. So far, all the competition has been slideware-based. Vendors still aren't hitting the right notes yet to help customers see their way clear to signing purchase orders. Clearly, the concept still requires lots of education. Big users are giving it a good sniff, but the price tag's giving everyone quite a bit of pause. It looks as if it will be some time before we see virtualization as widely deployed on storage as it is on servers.

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Virtualization stories from 2005 include:

No.4: NAS Proliferation

"Proliferation" may have been overstating it a bit when we discussed the prospects for NAS last year. Hitachi Data Systems got into NAS, but NAS was largely a team sport this year. IBM quit making its own and decided to handle NAS through an OEM deal with Network Appliance. EMC dropped its low-end Windows NAS, but Cisco agreed to sell EMC’s enterprise NAS filers. EMC acquired file virtualization startup Rainfinity for $90 million in an admission that global namespace is a key piece missing from its own NAS products. Growing popularity of NAS gateways prompted Hewlett-Packard to OEM PolyServe software, and Microsoft rolled out a server for clustered computing.

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NAS stories from 2005 include: