DIS-covery Media Storage Trend Report

The DIS-covery Trends Report: Storage is derived from our most recently published Media Storage World tm 2008 that came out in March 2008. That report, in its full version, intended mainly for manufacturers also includes product data, brand shares and brand image rankings as well as greater depth of detail, generally. The full report, MSW 2008 is one of the most popular reports in the server industry, subscribed to by most of the major manufacturers. Storage is broken up into three sub-sections: Local, Shared and Mass/Clustered.

What the DIS-covery report on Storage gives you is, lots of technology trends information, budgets and revenues, shows and magazines, classification, applications, purchase sources, as well as a key to what the major trends are that are most moving the marketplace. See the Table of Contents for greater detail.

Executive Summary of the Media Storage Worldwide 2008 Findings

The new report proceeds from last year’s benchmarking achieved by the first DIS global end-user survey in the three genres of Local, Shared and Mass/Clustered storage technology. And, that report marked its assessments of the state-of-the-market regarding the overall situation as well as to illustrate the divide between those three aspects of broadcast and professional storage. This report marks the first attempt to track the changes and developments in storage and gauge the rate of growth in this volatile arena, since the 2007 benchmark.

The storage field has continued to be inundated with many new competitors, most of whom were offering new Local, Shared or Mass or Clustered storage solutions that had the effect of pulling down average prices, overall, particularly in the highly priced Mass or Clustered part of the market. But, it also revealed some interesting trends that seem to have held on into this report, such as a potential slowing of sales in certain user applications like VOD, Play-Out or Ingest. And, the move away from the earlier dominance of robotic, tape-based systems, like those of Odetics, or the older Panasonic and Sony robotic tape-based systems, to the widespread use of application-specific electronic file-based ones. Since the late 1990s in particular, the market has drifted away from video based files stored on tape and ingested via tape machines to codec and computer oriented, file-based aggregation.

In Local storage the main element of churn is caused by the existence of so many competitive offerings, making it difficult for any one brand to stand out in the crowd. This is a market that is less focused on a specific series or model as it is on capacity, speed, inter-operability, functionality and brand experience…. for systems, anyway. Yet, for the actual components of the system – blades, RAID and individual units of HHD, it’s a commodity market. In today’s professional video market, such additional storage capacity is generally purchased in fairly large increments, with a TB being the most common denominator. That said, especially when counting UNITS of installed drives, where they may have smaller capacities some handicapping should occur and averaging to a lower than TB level. The net, net is that with 2.7 million units of storage owned by single-seat users (of Local storage capacity) that means roughly 2 million Terabytes of storage are in use by those end-users. That’s pretty awesome storage use by any standard. Add that to the storage capacity represented by both the Shared and Mass storage units and it equals a prodigious quantity of storage all together. It is a very big market and growing far bigger by leaps and bounds.

Our definition of Local storage was that which augments and expands on that which was purchased with the original single PC or Mac, Shared, that which allows multiple PCs or Macs to share one central storage bay and Mass (or clustered) that which adds control, massive capacity and greater functionality, often tethered to servers. When collecting and reporting the UNITS in Local storage, particularly, we see over 400,000 seats referred to and often hundreds of thousands of units of storage – these are multiple units of RAID, HDD or blades of storage being owned or bought by those individual end-user seats. They are not directly referring to a number of TB (although that issue is dealt with in the tech trends section of the report under storage capacity).

Table of Contents

Front Matter

• Introduction and General Overview
• Product Genres & Markets Surveyed

General

• Type of operation
• Size of operation/ Number of employees
• Leading applications as such: News, Web-Streaming, Sports, Documentary, Programs, Film, etc.
• Size of budget
• Budget increasing, decreasing or remaining the same (2007/2008)
• Size of revenues
• Revenues increasing, decreasing or remaining the same (2007/2008)
• Type of applications
• Extent of purchase authority
• Source of purchases
• Type of station or facility

Technology Trends

• Features most desired in new products
• Film versus digital percent
• Type of recording and storage utilized
• Maximum imaging, recording and storage capacity
• Departments responsible for equipment
• Workflow patterns
• Compression use
• Computer platforms used disk versus film
• Year of first system purchase
• Year of latest system purchase

Magazines, Trade Shows & Websites

• Trade magazines read and preferred
• Single most valued
• Trade shows attended and planned
• Single most valued
• Websites visited
• Websites most valued

Price $400USD

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