back to article Enterprise storage is a stagnant – and slightly smelly – pond

Earlier this year I was at HPE Discover in Las Vegas and talking to Calvin Zito about the latest IDC Storage Tracker results. Calvin posted on the Around The Storage Block blog, covering details on both servers and storage. He highlighted the fact HPE was now ahead of EMC in terms of total Enterprise System Storage sales. Note …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Numbers will change

    For EMC especially, as the world moves more towards converged architecture. VCE should do well here, but also Nutanix and some of the HPE lines.

    The elephant in the room: what happens when those Dell customers are exposed to EMC post-acquisition?

  2. Androgynous Cow Herd

    Nice work

    One thing you are not factoring is the impact of Nimble, Pure, and the remaining class of 2009 storage startups. Every time they make a win, it is at the expense of one of the vendors on your list. That's millions of dollars shifting off of your analysis, right there.

  3. FH
    WTF?

    chart color

    Why the author changes the color of bar(vs vendors) every graph??

  4. Steve Chalmers

    Measuring the technology cycle in action

    When we as an industry launched Fibre Channel two decades ago, we made a choice to reuse rather than replace the then decade-old server-side SCSI software stack. That choice in turn preserved a boundary between server and shared storage which made storage systems what they've evolved to over those decades.

    Both flash based storage -- which causes us to revisit the SCSI decision and leads to NVMe and NVMe over Fabric -- and the emergence of http-over-Ethernet accessed, highly cost-per-GB sensitive object storage systems call for very different storage system designs. Those newer designs don't fit the model of traditional storage systems,

    So we'll likely see analyses like this which capture sales in one storage technology approach but not the other approaches competing for those same customer dollars. If you think the numbers today are confusing, just wait for storage-in-memory to take hold. Then it will be really hard to divide the revenue between what is server revenue and what is storage revenue.

    1. chrismevans

      Re: Measuring the technology cycle in action

      Steve, I agree with you entirely here and that's the point I was getting to, amongst others. We've diversified from an industry that is pure external storage (arrays based on either FC, iSCSI, NFS etc) to a scenario where storage sold could be from the server downwards. How will VMware Virtual SAN sales be accounted for? How will software sales be measured? How will new products that have direct server attach be classified?

      In the traditional business measure, some vendors are declining, some are doing well - is this actually accurate to their overall sales? We need new measures.

      Chris

  5. Nate Amsden

    servers sold with storage

    I assume that means servers sold with internal storage on their RAID cards or whatever and not say buying a dozen HP servers with another HP 3PAR storage array on the same quote or something ?

    If the former, then I wonder if there is any cut off as to the amount of storage required to be considered for being classified as that (e.g. I would not count a server with local disks just for boot drive with intentions of connecting to external storage to be a server "with storage", not everyone boots their servers from their SAN(I do).

    And hell if I'm going to trust some piece of shit $10 USB stick(or SD card) to run a hypervisor on an otherwise $25-30k+(hardware+software) piece of equipment.

    1. chrismevans

      Re: servers sold with storage

      Nate, there must be a cut off, however I guess historically, external arrays and servers shipped with more than a boot disk have been easy to measure. Same thing with analysts using the "all-flash" category, which requires systems cannot be upgraded with disk, because it makes the measuring easier.

  6. Yaron Haviv

    Nice, don't forget impact of DAS

    Chris,

    Nice work

    Beyond file/block SDS many move from traditional file and block to modern apps w Hadoop, Cassandra, Mongo, Elastic, Splunk, Vertica .. All those new DBs with resiliency built-in, w/o the need for (expensive) external Raid, some store Petabytes in those and I'm sure it has even more impact on the charts than HCI

    Yaron

    1. chrismevans

      Re: Nice, don't forget impact of DAS

      Yaron, I agree there is now an explosion of platforms for storage deployment. This is clearly driving the "storage systems" purchases. I guess we could measure these through looking at the (licensing) revenue of the companies in each sector (where available). It could make interesting reading.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like