"All I want for Christmas is a Savvio drive"...hard drives finishing the year strong

StorageNewsletter.com reports according to iSuppli, shipments of hard drives are expected to be up 2% in Q4 amounting to 169.2 Million units.

“The fourth-quarter increases in HDD shipments and revenue reflect positive developments on several fronts, including the stabilization of prices, strong demand from the enterprise segment and a return to normal inventory levels,” said Fang Zhang, analyst for storage systems at iSuppli.

Call it a holiday rush, or pent-up demand, whatever you want. iSuppli’s report points to strong demand for drives into 2011, especially enterprise drives which we know cannot be attributed to the holidays, unless you asked Santa for a Savvio drive for Christmas? Maybe…

I could not help but think of a Computerworld article I read last month based on a Gartner survey of IT Managers around the data growth challenges for the enterprise data center in 2011. Some of the big takeaways:

Data capacity on average in enterprises is growing at 40% to 60% year over year
62% of IT managers said they plan to expand hardware capacity at existing data centers by the end of 2011
30% of enterprise customers plan to build entirely new data centers in 2011

At the same time, other challenges have emerged beyond data growth:

37% named system performance and scalability as the second biggest challenge for them in the coming year.
Business continuity and data availability are the main drivers of strategic plans.
47% ranked data growth in their top three challenges.
62% indicated they will invest in data retirement efforts

Makes me wonder if such demand is raising its head here in Q4. Let’s face it, the enterprise market is driven by the top OEMs and several dozen up and comers (whom as of late are being acquired by the top 5). In any case, the enterprise market is pretty defined and demand is pretty easy to measure…talk to 5 companies, and you have a pretty solid forecast. If enterprise demand is on the rise, and shows no signs of slowing over the next few quarters, then these Gartner trends are already happening today.

All of this in the midst of a presumed SSD takeover of hard drives? Read C’mon people….

What I think is that maybe these tablets everyone is talking about, and their lack of integrated storage, is driving data center capacity and performance demands already. All these tablets connect to data centers somewhere, and these data center managers are demanding greater performance, scalability, availability, and capacity… and therefore, hard drives…more and more hard drives.

Funny how we keep “spinning” full circle here.