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back to article Behold: Ten storage chieftains whose products hold humanity's data

Who are the ten most influential storage bosses? It should be an easy list to make but what do we mean by influential and should they be currently in post? "Influential" means more than that just "our customers have bought boatloads of our kit!" An influential company's competitors have had to react to its products and …

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  1. riteshkenny

    It's EMC

    Who else understands Storage better?

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  2. toughluck
    FAIL

    Hmmm, what about tape?

    What about Storagetek/Sun/Oracle and tape? What about IBM for that matter? You mentioned HP, which might go bankrupt and assets may disperse between various other companies, but both IBM and Oracle tape equipment right now holds more data (an order of magnitude more) on tape than is kept on disk. Tape still has the edge over flash for overall TCO, and flash vendors have to catch up with tape, not vice versa.

    I understand that you may be enamored with the new technologies, but as it stands, the list is woefully inadequate. Dropbox, Facebook and Amazon? Pretty much equivalent in terms of web storage -- pick any one of the three or add many more to the list if you really believe that they matter. How about adding Rapidshare, then? Going further, I see fusion-io, which is apparently struggling, as you yourself reported:

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/31/fio_q2_fy2013/

    Is this the financial outlook of a market leader and a successful company?

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/25/fusion_io_marklogic/

    It doesn't seem that Fusion-IO is leading in benchmarks, either. Or are you considering adding OCZ to the list as well? It certainly doesn't seem that competition has to chase Fusion-IO in anything.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Hmmm, what about tape?

      LOL... Tape, Oracle, IBM, Dropbox, Facebook to be considered for storage leadership? Thanks for the laugh!

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      1. toughluck
        Reply Icon

        Re: Hmmm, what about tape?

        You're welcome. And no, I didn't mean absolute leadership, but some of the names and companies should have never made the list.

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  3. Don Jefe
    Joke

    Women?

    Where are the women on this list? I feel that the storage industry must be engaging in sexual discrimination in their hiring and promotion processes.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Women?

      You see, in order for women to get into senior management .. they have to actually work for the damn company first. I work in this industry and the only women that even apply for jobs in our company are looking for secretarial, HR and sales jobs. Out of >120 engineers there were 2 women. And they made one of them into a manager despite her being the least qualified for the job! (yayy, positive discrimination is sooo good for morale!)

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  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Don Basile

    Should win just for the hair in his picture.

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  5. Dave Nicholson

    That's Million with a "B"

    Data Domain. *Billion* dollar biz, but what's $999,000,000.00 among friends?

    A million ain't what it used to be. ;-)

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  6. Daedalus
    Thumb Down

    Hold on thar, pardner

    These storage guys are so good at storing data in multiple redundant places that one storm in one place in the US took down a whole bunch of operations.

    H-Y-P-E !

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  7. anthonypoh

    Surprised HP are on here given how badly they've let their StorageWork division decline..... for years (until they acquired 3PAR) they didn't do anything with their EVA products..... I remember when they use to sell tons of these arrays!

    Not really surprised with the likes of Amazon/Facebook/Dropbox.... cloud storage/computing is taking off.....

    Although shouldn't Google be on here too? Aren't they a pioneer of non-vendor specific hardware like Facebook?

    As for NetApp & IBM.... NetApp have stopped innovating over the past few years (IMO), but IBM have launched their v7000 to much praise (although I've not had much experience with it).

    No surprised that EMC are No. 1........ they have the best record for acquiring companies and turning them into market leaders!

    One other company to throw into the mix - Samsung....... Aren't they market leaders in flash memory and one of the main manufacturers of SDRAM? I thought I read on the Reg that they are looking at entering the PCIe flash storage market?

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