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Hardware Trends: Faster. Smaller. Cooler.

By: Joanne Cummings

5/20/2008

5 billion in Q4 2007, up 7.6 percent from the prior year's Q4. "Data storage remains a crucial component to the successful execution of enterprise business," Brad Nisbet, research manager at IDC, said in a statement. "The disk-storage systems market is benefiting from a wide variety of drivers, ranging from the simple need to store ever-increasing volumes of business data to the more sophisticated objectives around consolidation, virtualization and ease of management."

And as more enterprises look to mobilize their work forces, encryption becomes another key driver in storage. Look for storage systems that do full disk encryption, as well as on the server and in transit. The kicker is that with virtualization, CDP and encryption becoming more readily available, cost-effective and reliable, your customers can now expect to store data more efficiently even as they store more. That also means that their storage should become a bit greener. In addition to arrays becoming more efficient in terms of power and cooling (thanks to programs such as the Green Grid at www.thegreengrid.org and SNIA's Green Storage Initiative), new lifecycle management tools should help organizations become more savvy about what needs to be stored-and what doesn't.

4. The Desktop Is Dead -- Long Live Mobility
Client form factors are changing dramatically, moving away from desktops and toward notebooks and laptops. With portable PC shipments growing 33 percentage points faster than desktops, IDC expects the portable share of client PC shipments to reach 50 percent by the end of 2008.

"Consumers continue to be attracted by mobile platforms and are benefiting from the proliferation of channels and heightened competition, which continue to bring prices down," David Daoud, research manager in personal computing at IDC, said in a recent report forecasting continued growth in the mobile PC market. And that means that for your customers looking to refresh their desktop hardware, this year's best and most flexible option may well be going mobile.

In addition, laptops are becoming more aligned with virtualization initiatives. As more enterprises look to desktop virtualization solutions in which multiple desktops are hosted by a single data center server using products such as VMware's Virtual Data Infrastructure (VDI), laptops become an even more flexible option. Users can receive no-hassle access to their corporate desktops (and their data) both from work, from home and from the road. The VDI scenario is also more secure than traditional setups because all data remains in the data center, not on the laptop machine, which is far more likely to be lost or stolen than a desktop tower.


Look for laptops to become greener this year as well, in that they will become more energy-efficient, sporting smaller energy requirements and longer battery life due to the afore-mentioned wave of newly efficient and cooler processors. Add to that the nascent move to reliable solid-state disk drives a la Apple's Macintosh Air, and laptops become an increasingly attractive client choice.