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Garbage Collection – All-flash Market Consolidation

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In this opinion piece, recorded on 31 October 2016, Martin Glassborow, Chris Mellor and Chris Evans discuss the state of the all-flash market and what we can expect to happen to the remaining all-flash startup vendors.  We discuss Violin’s delisting, talk about the range of vendors and size of the market.  Mr Mellor presents his interpretation on the “Supernatural Quadrangle” of all-flash vendors and products.  We then speculate on the Chinese and the similarity of IBM’s storage portfolio to, well you’ll just have to listen….

One other thing – we promise to get ChrisM a headset for the next podcast…

  • Elapsed Time: 00:25:00
  • SFW: Yes

Timeline

  • 00:00:00 – Introduction
  • 00:00:20 – The Delisting of Violin Memory Inc
  • 00:00:54 – Background to Violin’s problems – $76m to $6m in value
  • 00:02:00 – Violin moves to OTCQX Market – $0.25 per share
  • 00:03:10 – Comparisons with Exanet and acquisition by Dell
  • 00:03:31 – List of Market players – incumbents:
    • HDS – VSP & HFS
    • Dell-EMC – VMAX, XtremIO, Unity, DSSD
    • IBM – FlashSystem, XIV flash, DS8800, DeepFlash, StoreWize F
    • NetApp – All-flash FAS, E-Series, SolidFire
    • HPE – 3PAR All-flash
    • Oracle – FS1
  • 05:07:00 – Market players – startups and others:
    • Pure Storage, Nimble, Nimbus, Kaminario
    • Tintri, Tegile, X-IO
    • E8, Mangstor, Excelero
    • SanDisk IntelliFlash
  • 07:07:00 – Exiting the mincer – Pure Storage and Nimble
  • 07:20:00 – SolidFire acquisition before IPO
  • 07:40:00 – Pure’s success in marketing & FlashBlade
  • 00:08:00 – Was SolidFire the last of the storage IPOs?
  • 00:08:30 – Market evolution has happened very quickly
  • 00:08:35 – Speed, price, features and data services
  • 00:09:00 – NVMe over Fabric and data services
  • 00:09:14 – Chatbot interfaces for storage!
  • 00:09:30 – How big is the market for all-flash and storage?
  • 00:10:30 – Is it a stagnant market (Link)
  • 00:11:10 – Comparisons to the tape market
  • 00:12:15 – How much money is being spent on Software Defined Storage?
  • 00:13:05 – We won’t see visibility of spend on open source storage software
  • 00:13:30 – Storage Unpacked Supernatural Quadrangle….
    • Leaders – Dell-EMC, HPE, Pure and NetApp
    • Challengers – HDS, IBM, Nimble, Oracle, Tegile, Tintri
    • Niche – Kaminario, Nimbus, Violin, X-IO
    • Visionaries – Apeiron, E8, Excelero, Mangstor, DSSD
  • 00:14:14 – Consolidation by fading away, rather than acquisition or IPO
  • 00:14:40 – How many customers to these startups actually have?
  • 00:16:00 – Excellent technology and roadmaps – but is that enough?
  • 00:17:23 – Was marketing good enough from the startups
  • 00:18:10 – Predictive analytics – positive benefit for Nimble
  • 00:18:50 – Pure Storage being acquired by Cisco?
  • 00:20:00 – The Chinese angle (Huawei and Lenovo)
  • 00:20:34 – Lenovo to pick up IBM
  • 00:21:00 – IBM’s disjointed portfolio?
  • 00:21:30 – The return of Ed Walsh to IBM – why?
  • 00:22:20 – Evolution, Virtual SAN, containers and hybrid market?
  • 00:23:00 – Blurring of the lines – Virtual SAN supporting external iSCSI
  • 00:23:20 – Hyper-converged – does it suit all our needs?
  • 00:24:00 – Other tech for discussion – NVDIMM and QLC flash
  • 00:24:30 – Wrap Up

Companies referenced in this podcast:

Apeiron Data Systems, Dell-EMC, E8 Storage, Exanet, Exelero, Fusion-io, Hitachi Data Systems, HPE, IBM, Kaminario, Mangstor, NetApp, Nimble Storage, Nimbus Data, Nutanix, Oracle Corporation, Pure Storage, Quantum, SanDisk, Tegile, Tintri, Violin Memory Inc, VMware, Western Digital, Whiptail, X-IO Technologies.

Copyright (c) 2016 Storage Unpacked.  No reproduction or re-use without permission.

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