Storage is the bottleneck in today's datacenters

There's been an unprecedented amount of activity in the storage space this year, with a host of promising new companies launching, and major storage vendors beginning to drastically retool their architectures to accommodate the modern IT realities of virtualization and cloud computing.


The storage system is the most expensive component to purchase, the most costly to maintain, and the source of the most difficult management and performance problems. Storage today is also under rapid change due to the advent of multi-core CPUs, 10 Gb Ethernet and flash, which are rapidly replacing hard disks in performance-intensive applications.

After spending decades designing and optimizing storage systems to work around scarce CPU cycles, low-bandwidth networks and slow mechanical hard disks, these problems have now disappeared along with many of the advantages existing vendors had created with decades of investment in existing storage technologies.