When I made the predictions I was in illusion that things on this field would change quickly.
I more start to understand your point: “silly notion that Flash would someday replace disk”

There are fields where flash is very much replacing hard disks, but there are many applications where there is place for magneti storage: you can’t beat the storage price.
Other point favoring the hard disk is that there will be for long time be pretty limited capacity to manufacture flash chips – meaning you can’t soon manufacture enough flash to replace all the hard disks even if higher price per bit would not be a problem.

That’s my take.

However, the most glaringly non-realized prediction you made is the one you didn’t comment on, namely “Spinning rust and tape are DEAD.” I suspect you didn’t address this one because almost everyone is still scratching their heads wondering WHY it’s not happening.

By now you probably know (as many counter-hype-cycle experts have been trying to tell us since early 2000′s) that Flash can never (ever, ever) replace spinning disk. Chris Mellor at The Register just recently figured this out…

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/09/no_flash_datacentre_takeover/

The fundamentally broken economic argument that fostered the very silly notion that Flash would someday replace disk gets more broken every year, as each increase in NAND density brings a resultant decrease in performance.

I’d be interested to hear your take…

Talk of hybrid IT is all the rage. Gartner predicts that “Nearly half of large enterprises will have hybrid cloud deployments by the end of 2017,” while James Staten at Forrester writes, “Too late, you are already hybrid.”

The details depend on the fine print of the forecast, and how broadly you think about “IT” or “cloud.” But whatever the specifics, there’s broad agreement that IT departments are becoming more hybrid. That is to say, they source their infrastructure and applications from more and more different places, in more and more different forms.

Parts of IT have long been outsourced in one form or another—through service bureaus, co-location facilities, managed service providers, or other types of external agencies.

Today’s moves to a hybrid model started out being driven by the consumer Internet, and by startups taking a “public-cloud first” approach. The result is that many new applications are widely being delivered in the form of Software-as-a-Service—this is especially true for those tasks that are common across companies, such as collaboration, email, and customer relationship management.

At the same time, Amazon Web Services (AWS) pioneered a model whereby pay-as-you-go computing was only a credit-card away.

The reality is that the vast bulk of organizations will be hybrid—not just private nor just public. The implications of increasingly hybrid IT fall into two main areas: technological and organizational

The challenge of hybrid is to avoid creating isolated islands that can’t communicate or exchange data. My advice is to maximize the portability of applications and data among different providers and between on-premise infrastructure and off-premise providers.

While larger organizations will doubtless continue to have some specialized IT roles, more and more IT managers will need to become generalists. They’ll have to adapt to broader roles that reflect less focus on narrow technology stovepipes—like storage, networking, or virtualization.

“We need to be innovation leaders for the organization, offering new capabilities and showing how technology can be deployed to further business advantage.”

The Bottom Line
Something needs to change. And hybrid is an important part of that answer.

The level of venture capitalist (VC) investment being pumped into UK and Irish tech companies is now “reminiscent” of the early 2000s, with funding for the third quarter of 2014 double that of a year ago, according to research.

Overall investment for the whole of 2014 is expected to be up 70 per cent to £1.6bn across 350 companies, compared with 2013.

“These levels of growth are reminiscent of the 1999/2000 period,” said chief executive Stuart McKnight. “But we are some way off the peak in November 2000 when 67 deals were completed in one month,” he said.

Brocade is a member of the flat revenue Earth society, with its mix of annual and quarterly Fibre Channel and Ethernet revenues hardly changing between last year and this year.

Brocade’s fourth fiscal 2014 quarter revenues of $564m were up by one per cent year-on-year, up from $559m a year ago, and also up three per cent sequentially.

Q4 2014 SAN product revenue was $325m, flat year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter.

He says Brocade is positioned well for the “new IP”: one that is “optimised for the unique requirements of the cloud, social, mobile, and Big Data.” Sounds pretty much like last year’s IP – but this one is “open software-driven, agile, and [has] secure networking architectures.”

New software-defined networking apps will be delivered next year.

That’s a big ask for Brocade as a software-defined network, when using commodity hardware, doesn’t command proprietary gear margins.

Meanwhile, Ader’s conclusion is that “the growth outlook for Fibre Channel is challenged and that the IP side of the business faces stiff competition.”

Lenovo Solidifies Top Spot in 2014 Rankings; HP Narrows the Gap with Strong Fourth Quarter

The PC market never really died, it was just resting – at least according to our man at Gartner, who leaned on the latest global sales data to prove there’s some life left yet in the form factor.

According to preliminary stats, sales into channels grew one per cent in Q4 to 83.7 million boxes as retailers and disties took delivery of more stock in anticipation of a mini return to consumer spending.
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Ranjit Atwal, research director at Gartner, said the impact of tablets is “lessoning” amid high levels of penetration.

“The PC market never died,” he told us, “but it shrank to a smaller size of users that are perhaps more engaged”.

The US market led the PC shipment recovery, with sales up 13.1 per cent to 18.1 million units, units were up in EMEA by 2.8 per cent to 26.5m and two per cent in Asia Pacific to 26.6m.

Lenovo maintained its lead at the top, with sales up 7.5 per cent to 16.28 million PCs, taking market share to 19.4 per cent. But it was challenged in Q4 by HP’s growth of 16 per cent and market share of 18.8 per cent. For the year, Lenovo extended its lead at the top.

The exit of the Sony and Samsung brands from the PC market benefited the major players, Gartner said.