During 2014, the IT industry saw major investments in new technologies for storage, networking, and computing. Key developments included IBM releasing an all-flash storage system, Apple expanding its datacenter, and Coho announcing general availability of its web-scale storage product. There were also significant acquisitions such as VMware buying Airwatch and IBM acquiring Cloudant. The year ended with the industry shifting towards hybrid cloud and hyper-converged infrastructure solutions.

1. 2014
A Year in
Review
During the past 12 months the storage, networking,
and computing space has been flooded with big
dollar investments in new technologies none of us
were even dreaming about only a few years ago.
We’ve gathered some of the ho est news (of both
successes and casualties) for an overview of where
IT has brought us this year.
January 17
IBM Releases FlashSystem 840
Technology: All-flash storage
Features: On-premise, improved data
protection, MicroLatency
Impact: IBM is now set to compete with
all-flash storage startups.
February 22
Apple Datacenter Expansion
Size: 14,256 .² additional building
Location: Maiden, NC
Impact: The expansion is on an
existing 500,000 .² facility
accompanied by the largest privately-
owned solar form in the country.
March 6
Coho Announces GA of
DataStream
Technology: Web-Scale Storage
Impact: Coho Data’s DataStream 1000
offers high performance, hybrid flash
scale-out storage for enterprises.
January 22
VMware Buys Airwatch
Technology: Mobility
Investment: $1.54 billion
Impact: Enables VMware to focus on
a mobility strategy and grow its share
in end user computing
February 24
IBM Acquires Cloudant
Technology: Cloud storage
NoSQL
Investment: $2 billion
Impact: A step further towards the
cloud using Cloudant’s collaboration
with Apache Couch DB
March 19
Cloudera Raises $160 Million
Technology: Big Data
Investors: Google Ventures
Michael Dell
Impact: Validates the relevance of
Hadoop adoption among enterprises.
Q1
April 1
Heartbleed Bug Discovered
Impact: All users (both enterprises and
their customers) of the OpenSSL
so ware are potential targets. Everyone
spends precious time changing
passwords and contemplating what
could possibly be next.
May 23
HP Invests in OpenStack
Technology: OpenStack
Investment: $1 billion over 2 years
Impact: Following in the footsteps of
IBM, HP is pu ing big bucks towards
the “Linux for the cloud” technology,
rebranded as Helion.
May 5
EMC Acquires DSSD
Technology: Flash storage, Big Data
Investment: Undisclosed
Impact:DSSD’s server-based flash
enables EMC to offer much improved
data accessibility to complement the
XtremIO flash array.
June 16
VMware Releases NSX Pricing
Pricing: Perpetual license: $5996/CPU
Term license: $34/VM
Impact: Available to resellers for the
first time with a vision of eliminating
consumers’ need for new networking
hardware.
Q2
July 23
Fusion iO Acquired by Sandisk
Technology: Flash storage
Investment: $1.1 billion
Impact: Expands Sandisks flash
hardware and so ware offerings,
supported by Fusion iO’s flash chip
technology.
August 26
Seagate Ships First
8TB Hard Drive
Technology: Hard disk drive storage
Claim: Best wa s/GB rating in
enterprise storage
Impact: Doubles the 4TB hard drive
capabilities that were considered
revolutionary only a couple of
years ago.
September 17
NetApp Announces FlashRay
Technology: All-flash storage
Impact: The company’s all-flash
portfolio is filled out (alongside the
EF and FAS series) and ready to
compete with startups as well as
EMC’s XtremIO.
August 25
VMware announces EVO: Rail
Technology: Hyper-converged
infrastructure (HCIA)
Pricing: Undisclosed
Impact: The first of a family of
‘Evolutionary’ Hyper-converged
Infrastructure offerings that boost
the relevance of So ware-defined
solutions.
September 16
Docker Raises $40 million
Technology: Containers
Investors: Sequoia Investors
Impact: A month a er collaborating
with VMware, Docker containerization
is funded as both a disruptive and
complementary technology to
virtualization.
September 24
Google Builds $770 Million
Data Center
Size: 4,736,120 ²
Location: Eemshaven, The Netherlands
Impact: The facility has direct
connection to Internet hubs London and
Amsterdam and is run on a variety of
renewable resources.
Q3
October 6
HP Split
Division: Consumer vs. Enterprise
Impact: Frees up money for R&D and
opens up many more opportunities for
R&D and partnerships.
October 27
NetApp Buys SteelStore
from Riverbed
Technology: Cloud storage, Backup
Investment: $80 million
Impact: SteelStore is saved from failure
and NetApp expands its portfolio with
hybrid cloud backup support.
October 31
SalesForce Opens New UK
Data Center
To be followed by new data centers in
France and Germany.
Impact: Reflects the global shi to
cloud computing and a growing
number of European SalesForce clients.
October 22
EMC Takes Over VCE
Impact: Cisco remains with only 10%
stake in the joint venture while EMC
has hold of 90%, with the intention of
speeding up VCE’s decision making
and innovation.
October 28
EMC Announces Enterprise
Hybrid Cloud
Technology: Hybrid Cloud, ITaaS
Features: Vblock technology
Impact: Following a triple acquisition of
Cloudscaling, Maginatics, and Spanning,
EMC now has a hybrid cloud offering
with pre-defined services to
virtualization.
Q4
December 12
Coho Data Announces GA of v2.0
Features: Site to Site Replication
Impact: Customers can protect their
storage from major disasters with Site
to site replication at the VM level
(SiteProtect) that is easy to deploy,
simple to use and adds no performance
overhead.