Storage Competition
Worries of traditional storage industry are deepening due to the fast growth of cloud service companies. The expansion of cloud services, which were initially expected to boost demand for storage, is becoming a strong barrier now.
According to the related industries on Sept. 4, storage companies such as EMC, IBM, and HP are busy coming up with plans to challenge the cloud service market led by Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. As a substantial part of the traditional storage market is likely to be substituted with cloud services, storage companies are aiming to develop new products and services to protect themselves.
Clients are more often storing their data in data centers rather than actually purchasing storage every year. According to IDC Korea, the cloud storage service industry worldwide was only US$4.44 billion in 2012, but is expected to almost double to US$8.198 billion won this year.
Accordingly, traditional storage companies, including market number one EMC, are struggling to prepare countermeasures.
EMC plans to launch “ScaleIO,” a storage management solution, while attempting to penetrate the public cloud market with its affiliate VMware. ScaleIO enables a removable hard disk drive simply connected to another hard disk to be managed as single storage. EMC will also target the cloud market with new software if the supply of hardware becomes unprofitable.
IBM and HP, which own cloud solutions, are also discussing the launch of cloud storage services in Korea, just like Amazon and Google.