Vendors report their revenues and net income/loss each quarter and their change since the same quarter a year ago.

There are three situations in which we get concerned about a storage vendor. The first of these is declining revenues. Giving us more reason to worry is declining revenue and falling net income. What sets the alarm bells ringing is an increased net loss coupled with slumping revenues. It means the storage vendor's business situation has become much worse during the course of the year.

What we see are two solidly successful storage bellwethers, EMC and IBM, who have both reported both steadily rising revenues and net income. They are mature and exceedingly well-run companies.

CommVault, QLogic, CA, Symantec, PMC Sierra and Imation also all showed the same positive changes in revenue and net income.

There are two start-up stars in this category: 3PAR (enterprise storage arrays) and Data Domain (deduplicating storage arrays) with 3PAR reporting its very first profit.

Revenue risers with no net income change include STEC (SSD controllers), Hitachi GST (disk drives), and Western Digital (disk drives).

In the we're-a-little-worried section are Mellanox (InfiniBand), Double-Take (server replication), Iron Mountain (physical tape vaulting primarily), F5 (file virtualisation switches), FalconStor (data protection and deduplication software), and, surprisingly, Seagate. They all showed revenue increases and but made a smaller profit than a year ago.

Moribund Sun is in a section all to itself as both its revenue and net income fell slightly.

Cisco showed a startling lapse in its high business standards by reporting a 14 percent drop in storage sales, which markedly contrasted with revenue rises in all other Cisco product sectors. It didn't reveal its storage net income figure.

Amongst companies reporting net losses, there are two with profitability in sight through revenue increases and much-reduced net losses: SAN storage start-up Compellent and storage silicon-to-systems supplier LSI, now a rapidly recovering mature company with slightly improved revenues and much reduced losses. Compellent recorded a 70%-plus revenue rise as its customer count went past 1,000. Like 3PAR, this is a storage vendor that's in the vanguard of a fresh batch of SAN storage vendors behind the established storage array vendors.

Quantum is in a class of its own as its net loss improved but its revenues decreased. It pulled off the trick of getting more profit from less revenue. Tape-based revenues are falling faster than disk protection and deduplication revenues are rising. That should change quickly as other deduplication vendors, like ExaGrid and Data Domain, are reporting rocketing revenue increases. Quantum could well benefit from the same customer imperative to radically increase disk backup storage efficiency.

Sick companies are those showing revenue rises but worsening net losses or a year-on-year net income change to a net loss. In this area of the storage market we find Isilon, Dot Hill, SanDisk and Riverbed.

Tags: San Free Storage Christmas Tree Storage Craft Store File Storage Cabinets Boxes Home Storage Storage Shed Lockers

Qlogic 7200 Series Ddr Infiniband Adapters Based On Truescale Asic Platform Now Certified As Intel
Intel Developer Forum -- QLogic Corp. (Nasdaq:QLGC), a leading supplier of high performance network infrastructure solutions, today announced that QLogic(r) 7200 Series InfiniBand(r) double data rate (DDR) adapters have been certified as Intel(r) Cluster Ready. The Intel Cluster Ready program makes it easier to design, build, sell, program, acquire, and deploy high performance computer clusters. By achieving Intel Cluster ...

Storage Bridge Bay Sbb Elects Mark Hall Of Xyratex As New Chairman Sbb Design And Specification
Intel Developer Forum (IDF) -- The Storage Bridge Bay (SBB) Working Group Board of Directors today announced the appointment of Mark Hall, senior worldwide product manager at Xyratex, as its new Chairman. Hall succeeds Dr. William Dawkins, senior technology strategist in Dell's Office of the CTO."We look forward to Mark's leadership and the fresh perspective he will bring to the ...

Virtualization Boosts Netapps Q1
NetApp posted strong first quarter results last night, reporting revenues of $869 million, a 26 percent hike on the same period last year. Although the first quarter figures were down 7 percent sequentially, NetApp comfortably beat analyst estimates of $861.6 million, underlining the comparative health of the storage sector.Like Brocade, which reported its third quarter results earlier this week, NetApp ...