Texas Tea

4:15 PM -- A bunch of storage companies are in Houston this week, hoping to strike oil at the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG) annual conference.

Gas and oil exploration is a big market for storage vendors, particularly those selling clustered file systems that help seismic researchers deal with digitized mapping and other data-intensive software. (See Storage Networks Get Energized and NetApp's Got Gas.)

And a look at the oil companies profits last quarter shows there should be a few gushers waiting to be tapped.

So it should be no surprise that NAS vendors EMC, Network Appliance, Hewlett-Packard, Isilon Systems, and Panasas were among exhibitors at the show, along with IBM, ADIC, EqualLogic, and NSI Software.

There were suitable press releases, like ones from Isilon and Panasas telling how these folks searching for gas are saving costs with the "right" storage. (See Panasas Wins Cluster Deal and Isilon Powers Gas Companies.)So here's our question: If these oil companies are saving so much money on storage, why are we paying so much for gas? When will they start passing along the savings to consumers?

And don't say "around the time we develop alternative energy sources."

— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch