So in homage to our no. 1 maxim here are some silly pics to cement the concept:

The View from OM

Only a fool breaks the two copy rule. Enough said!

What a 12 months. We have shot past the Petabyte of MatrixStore deployed mark, picked up more than a dozen new customers and consolidated our position in the market very nicely indeed. 2011 looks rosy and we are looking forward to building out the business further in the UK with more integrations coming to ensure MatrixStore fits in any workflow (Vidispine,  Pheonix7, AVID Interplay, Tape Libraries etc). We also have exciting expansion plans with distribution models being worked for entry into the USA, Australia and mainland Europe. In fact we will have our first US install in March so look out USA, the 3 maxims are coming your way!

We would not have achieved the spectacular growth this year without the direct and indirect support of many people and organisations. We have also achieved this spectacular growth in spite of a few individuals and organisations, come the revolution and all that!

So a shout out to the believers:

Firstly to ALL of our customers. Big Thanks!

Too many to mention here obviously. The following were simply on the right side of the chasm when we needed them!

Rich Moss and the Mwnci team. First AVID customer to take the plunge. A working partnership that produces results.

Brian Hardman. Now a customer but a friend and influencer of OM a good while before.

Mark, Jim, Alex, John and the team at HGWW for their continued support and roadmap development!

The backers:

Our investors have put huge faith in us not to mention pots of cash. Thank you.

The influencers:

Will Strauss. From up north but more than willing to work with smaller vendors to get their story out. Note to all storage or IT publications, small UK vendors do exist and are of interest. Every story does not emanate from Hopkinton!

Jonathan Eric Tyrell. For spreading the word where ever he goes. Much appreciated.

Steve Sharman of them there Mediasmiths.

Neil and Kevin. You know who you are. Your support is much appreciated.

The Knights. Again no need for names here. A group of people who provide advice, contacts and friendship.

The WIG group. We are looking forward to continuing to work with the very exciting tech companies that make up that ensemble ( VidiSpine etc) and to the next meeting in 2011.

Dw, You scare us … in a good way.

And the resellers of course:

Mike Fitchie and the team at the Picture Exchange. AVID ninjas.

Neil, Craig et al. chez NMR.com.

Bryan, Mark, Stuart at Tyrell (and Nick S).

Graham, Rupert and the team at Root6.

Things to look out for in 2011:

• MatrixStore Mini. Full launch a coming. Already in use by a FTSE 100 company. Sneak pic here.
• AVID Interplay Integration. First true disk based archive providing digital preservation and on-demand content re-use for AVID Interplay Environments.
• Tape library support. We started off disk yeeeaaah, tape boooooo. We still kind of think that way but some of our customers would prefer we did not. To those customers: we are listening.
• EMC dropping Chad’s Basement. Sorry Chuck .. I had to say it!

The View From OM

There is no point in naming the detractors, we believe if people are ‘dissing’ you then you must be doing something right! Competition does not need to be a dirty word and muck spreading tactics and peddling misinformation gets you nowhere. Customers are seeing through the fud.

We are concentrating on our own game and are understandably very  excited about the next 12 months. When we started out we were told that the first customer is the hardest to get, then when we got 3 customers we were told the first 3 are hardest to get. Someone told me recently the first 10 customers are the hardest … AARRGHH. The reality is that you have to work hard for all of them! We are completely focused on the creative video market, we have merged our 50+ years of clustered object storage knowledge with the ever changing requirements faced by creative professionals.

Lastly to the dedicated and professional team at OM .. it’s been emotional!

Here is my take on just how heavy 1 Petabyte of disk drives was in 1980 and is today. (Disks only, not taking into account server chassis, racks, power and airco units to support it! UPDATE: also all information, the weights, garnered via internet search and wikipedia ..)

The answer from 1980:

One Petabyte of IBM 3380

And the answer today:

One Petabyte of Western Digital Caviar Green

UPDATE

I guess this will be a living blog post given that drives are increasing in capacity every two seconds! With the 3TB internal drive hitting the streets I have put together another image (quick and dirty apparently!):

The View from OM

Disk efficiency, capacity and usability has all increased enormously in the last 3 decades making it more and more feasible to protect/archive content on disk long term. When companies like EMC currently have over 2000 clients storing over 1 Petabyte of content it makes you think that 1 Petabyte is not that large an amount after all.

Object Matrix Storage Team

p.s Used purely marketing figures in the calculations (1kb == 1000bytes) .. obviously using real, tech numbers (1024) we would be looking at more disks. I look forward to the day we can all talk in 1024.

The View from OM:

Hope this whets your appetite as Jon will be publishing a more detailed comparison of the two approaches in the coming weeks.

Green Storage

Don't Panic

Where is that runner?

Tape Cuts

I will not re-open the whole tape vs disk debate here, there are older, wiser and less biased heads out there in the blogosphere (storagemojo.com, drunkendata.com etc) who have written reams on the pros and cons of both technologies.
Cheers from sunny south Wales and have a nice weekend…