The third group that Clayton says to watch for signs of change in an industry are the Nonconsumers. In this case, people who have storage and information management problems to solve but are not buying current products because they either cant afford them, or cant adapt them to their unique needs. As I mentioned in Part I, the most interesting group of nonconsumers are in High Performance Technical Computing HPTC. They have both problems. One, their research budgets dont allow them to buy expensive supercomputers and RAID arrays, and two, todays arrays dont meet their needs anyway. To build cheap supercomputers, they cluster together lots of x64 compute nodes running Linux. Then, because they spread their HPTC compute task across so many compute nodes, they need storage that enables sharing the data between all those processors. So, even if they could afford todays block or NAS arrays, they dont support this level of information sharing anyway.

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