In 2000, 93 new storage companies were launched with a first round of funding. In 2007 just five new storage companies were funded with first-round money. This has had the effect of slowing down the flow of new ideas and invention, suggesting that we are now in a period of re-invention rather than invention. There were over 60 disk drive manufacturers in 1980 and today just six remain as consolidation has taken its toll. Data centers are consolidating their oversupply of storage devices by undertaking extensive virtualization projects. Five tape formats make up the majority of all tape sales and 12 vendors supply or OEM tape libraries.

As a result of these indicators, the disk industry generated revenues of $26 billion and the tape industry just over $4 billion in 2007. Revenues are down from the beginning of the century when the disk industry generated revenues of $31 billion and the tape industry totaled $4.3 billion. Optical disk plays a primary role in the entertainment and personal appliance markets but is seldom used in the data center. Personal appliances are driving a new set of data management and security concerns as over 20 percent of the world’s IT force uses mobile computing.

IT executives identify security, data classification, virtualization, e-mail management, tiered storage, e-mail and database archiving and virtual tape libraries as their more pressing storage priorities. High on the storage ‘to-do’ list is addressing underutilized resources, particularly for non-mainframe systems, where storage management capabilities lack those of mainframe systems. For storage hardware, capacity reclamation, which relates to a significant variance in the amount of allocated versus used capacity for both disk and tape in most IT environments, has gained significant focus.