By Calvin Zito

I live in Boise Idaho and over the Fourth of July I took my kids to see Miley Cyrus in Provo, Utah at the annual Stadium of Fire.  Since it was a six hour drive each way, I had a lot of time to think.  One of the things I found myself contemplating was where storage was 15 years ago - that's how old Miley is now and it was only natural for me to reflect on the last 15 years.  Putting my thoughts in order around the state of storage was an interesting exercise.

Fifteen years ago I was just returning from a 6 month working assignment in the HP European Marketing Center in Boeblingen, Germany.  I helped introduce the first disk array for HP-UX based systems.  If I remember correctly, it supported 5 or 6 1.3GB drives - basically the amount data we can put on a DVD today.  We were also putting the finishing touches on one of the first virtualized disk arrays - something we called HP AutoRAID.  It first shipped in 1995 and was a 24GB disk array.  In May 1999, we announced our first XP platform - the XP256.  It scaled up to 9TB.  Jumping forward to now, we just recently announced the Extreme Data Storage System and that will scale to 820TB split between two racks.  Wow - things sure have changed A LOT in fifteen short years!

I went back a bit further in my mind to when I started working for HP as a "Customer Engineer" working for Rick Kontur in Fullerton, California.  In 1983, I was trained on the most recent HP disk drives - does anyone beside me remember the HP 7925 - a removable platter disk drive with a whopping 125 MB's in the footprint of an apartment size washing machine.  It's amazing to me to think about the physical size of that disk drive and the amount of storage we can pack into that same amount of space today.  Here's a picture of a HP 7925 that I found with a Google search:

Today with 1 TB drives becoming common, I wonder what storage will look like 15 years from now.  Miley will only be 30 years old - while she certainly will grow and mature, I hope she doesn't change as much as storage will over the next fifteen years (and as a few other recent teen pop stars have dramatically changed).

Do any of you have any recollections about storage over the years?  Where do you think storage is going?  I'd love to hear from you.

I hope you had a great Fourth of July weekend.