The web community and data storage community came together at the Blue Chalk cafe in downtown Palo Alto last night at Mixer 2.0. Great food, drinks and conversations occurred at this community event, there was even an iPhone giveaway. Thanks to our hosts Hitachi Data Systems and ArcScale. Thanks to Terry Chay of Lunch 2.0 for promoting.

It’s great that Hitachi is reaching out the social media community, as this report from the Research IT Toolbox shows that IT decision makers trust social media far more than vendor marketing.

Web and Data grow
Facebook is growing at a phenomenal rate, users are creating data, media, and it has to be backed up, replicated and protected (Think of that major power outage that impacted the top websites in SF this week) The web is weak, data loss could be a disaster. I know quite a few young and lean startups that only have one backup of data, they are lean as funding for the startup is smaller than the last bubble. As many of you know, I was the community manager at Hitachi Data Systems before my current role, part of my job was to watch the growing market, gather intelligence and connect prospects with our customer teams. It was great to see many of my old friends and colleagues last night, great job reaching out to the community.

[As we upload our lives and businesses to the web, the dependence of management and safety becomes essential]

Who creates data? we do!
To me, the most exciting thing is the growth of data from users. We are creating data, and we are uploading it to the cloud. For example, I’ve uploaded over 16,000 pictures to Flickr over the last two years. Each one is replicated into different sizes (square, thumbnail, small, medium, and large) then likely replicated for backup and safety reasons a few times on the Yahoo servers. We discovered at this dinner with Dave Roberson that Thomas Hawk (one of the top photographers in the blogosphere) consumes 10mb per photo with his prosumer camera gear –he takes hundreds every day.

Life uploaded to the web
Thanks to our hosts Hitachi Data Systems and Arcscale, both data storage solution providers, located right here in Silicon Valley for the drinks, good times and giveaways. There’s plenty of room for these companies to support the growing ecosystems, for example all of the 100+ online data storage companies will need solutions. And even some of the big players like Amazon that have emerged in the storage space, serving Smugmug, and the massive (50TB) virtual world SecondLife doesn’t have a storage footprint in a datacenter, they’ve outsourced it to Amazon’s S3 service –they will need enterprise storage solutions.

Related Resources
I’m watching this space carefully, I’m one of the few social media bloggers that is watching the data storage market for startups, here’s a few related resources if this interests you, some of my blog posts become articles in Search Insider.

Hu Yoshida’s CTO Blog at HDS, what happened to David?

Hitachi’s mega Lunch 2.0 “Web Expo” in Summer 2006

Future of Online Data Storage: 40 points

EMC’s Josh Maher is leading community for a Lunch 2.0

High end storage fans in Facebook created by Josh Maher

Sun reaches to startups at STIRR

View my dozens of posts tagged “data storage”

Here’s me uploading my life to the web, fun, food, drinks and faces.

(Personal Note: Hiya to my former colleagues at HDS, wishing you all the best, I’m doing well, learning a lot, sharing what I know. My email is on the top right of this blog, which I update daily, and I can be found in Facebook, or Twitter)