FalconStor Blog
Data Protection (4)
My father was a coder. As a member of the Apollo Mission, he worked with thousands of other dedicated engineers to safely place the first man on the moon. At the age of six, I watched my dad, his crew cut team of chain-smoking TRW programmers, and friends and neighbors huddle around our RCA television. When Apollo 11 touched down and Neil Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface, my father exclaimed, “The world will never be the same!”
Data levels are doubling every 18 months. This rapid increase should come as no surprise when nearly everything we do has a digital element associated with it. When we text, we contribute one of 173 billion text messages sent every year. When we buy something, there is a digital transaction; Walmart alone posts 1 million customer transactions per hour. When we check up on our friends, we are one of 600 million Facebook users browsing through 40 billion photos. Apple iTunes recently delivered its 10 billionth download. Amazon now sells 180 Kindle books for every 100 hard covers.
All of this data must live somewhere, and the challenges of storing, managing and protecting all of it is spurring new approaches and architectures. Today, all of us at FalconStor find ourselves in the right time, in the right place and among the right people to create those approaches and make the most of an unprecedented market opportunity.
I stayed up late the other night to watch game seven of the NBA Playoff series. As soon as the fourth quarter ended, before any Lakers fans had even started setting fires in the streets of L.A., I got an AP alert on my phone that the Celtics had lost. Five minutes later, highlights from the game were on ESPN and the cable news channels; and early the next morning, I read about it in the newspaper. I witnessed it myself, then watched and read as others analyzed it.
I had the same feeling as I read Timothy Prickett Morgan’s story on IT Jungle last week about the rebound in sales of servers and storage arrays. I have a courtside seat to that game; I see FalconStor customers every day who are emerging from the economic downturn and directing IT budgets toward storage expansion and data protection. I love seeing analysts and media confirming the trends we’re seeing.
In his article, Prickett Morgan recounts the findings of a recent Gartner study, which analyzed activity in the server and storage markets in the first quarter of 2010. Here are some of the highlights:
One of the nice things about the technology sector is that it’s never boring – there are always changes to make life interesting. This can be a new technique that provides a better solution to a problem, or a new, disruptive technology that requires us to re-evaluate our current processes.
