Garbage Collection - All-flash Market Consolidation

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