This week saw research on the sub-$10,000 USD NAS market almost doubling in size from 2009 to 2010. Hitachi announces a cloud storage system with 3GB of free storage. Adaptec’s 6-series RAID controllers get a design win.
Sub-$10K NAS Market Spikes According to Infonetics Research
Market research firm Infonetics Research this week released excerpts from its new quarterly NAS Appliance market share and forecast report for the sub-$10,000 network attached storage (NAS) market. Results were that the year/ year growth from 2009 to 2010 approached around $421 million, or almost double 2009 numbers. That is pretty impressive given that cloud storage was rapidly growing during this period. The companies tracked include Buffalo, Dell, D-Link, NETGEAR, QNAP (which grew significantly), Drobo, EMC, HP, Iomega, LaCie, Seagate, Synology, Western Digital, and others. The fact that Dell was not on the excerpt’s list was interesting.
Hitachi Announces HitachiBackup.com with 3GB Free
Hitachi GST announced HitachiBackup.com, a cloud storage service providing anywhere, anytime access to digital content. The first 3 gigabytes (3GB) of online storage are free. 3GB is enough for many users today who just want to do basic document storage. For those not using Apple, Amazon.com, or Google for their cloud media backups, HitachiBackup.com offers 250GB of storage for $50/ year.
Adaptec 6-Series Controllers Get a Design Win
The newly available Adaptec 6-series 6.0gbps controllers that use new PMC-Sierra (the company that recently purchased Adaptec’s RAID card business and that powers the HP SAS expanders found frequently on this site), recently announced a design win. Digilant LLC announced that it will be using the new Adaptec 6-series controllers with 6.0gbps SAS and SATA support. I have not tested the new 6-series but they are allegedly able to reach speeds 60% faster than the previous 5-series based on the Intel IOP 348 processor and also support Adaptec’s Zero-Maintenance Cache Protection (ZMCP) flash memory plus capacitor solution which is becoming preferred over traditional battery backup units (BBUs.)
Someone needs to start writing an application that is going to combine all of the free cloud storage into one big pool ;)
Someone will do it I am sure but management of something like that if you combined thirty free accounts with 3GB each for 90GB would be more hassle than a few dollars of backup costs.