back to article Who's the fat kid on the storage see-saw? We think it's All-Flash

We're in a kind of phoney war right now as all-flash arrays, hybrid arrays and hyper-conveged arrays fight for mind-and wallet-share. The storage world is in stasis whilst customers work out what to do with the onslaught of SAN/filer alternatives coming their way. What are the suppliers doing to cover the various ways customers …

  1. WhoTheHeckCares?

    Not sure you're looking at the latest two quarters of IDC Q/Q and Y/Y growth for storage...

    "Some mainstream suppliers such as EMC, HP and NetApp, are seeing a downturn in revenues from their traditional arrays."...

    If you look at IDC's market share figures for storage, lately EMC and Netapp (and all others except HP) have been flat or down, but HP has increased it's storage market share by a fairly sharp margin, over the last couple of quarters. The HP 3Par product line offers AFA, hybrid/converged, and traditional/HDD all using the same controller nodes, and with all the data services (automated tiering, thin provisioning and dedupe, replication, T10 unmap and checksum, effectively unlimited snapshots, and more) that you could ask for, now including both Object and NAS directly out of the nodes. Add in the extra goodness of HW "array-off-load acceleration" via ASIC, 4-node HA, six nines of availability guaranteed, peer-motion transparent migration and other useful features that customers seem to value, I don't really believe that you do your readers a service by lumping HP in with the other two, credible storage players though they all most certainly are. Have a look at the most recent market share figures - not just the last couple of months, which can be due to random factors, but the last 6 months, say, and see if you don't agree with this assessment. The trend seems to be solid, and continuing.

    1. jodey

      Re: Not sure you're looking at the latest two quarters of IDC Q/Q and Y/Y growth for storage...

      Disclosure: XtremIO employee here.

      The basis of the article is the trend towards AFA's --not the hybrid space. Here are the AFA numbers from IDC last year -- http://idcdocserv.com/252304e_EMC

      The latest Gartner report (5/1/15) indicates that EMC/XtremIO is the dominant force in the AFA industry with the nearest competitor being ~12 points behind. The latest numbers for AFA's are telling and HP is way down on that list.

      You can reference the latest Gartner finding on El Reg here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/05/11/gartner_says_storage_ssd_sales_flat

      1. MonkeysOnTheCar

        Re: Not sure you're looking at the latest two quarters of IDC Q/Q and Y/Y growth for storage...

        " the dominant force..." - How very EMC

  2. Freddellmeister

    I would not lump IBM all flash "IBM Flash Systems 900" with "traditional SAN/SSD" solutions like eXtremeIO.

    1. jodey

      Spell check for you... XtremIO is not a "traditional SAN/SSD" architecture. It is a native AFA specifically designed to take advantage of flash and simultaneously overcome the disadvantages of flash. Not all AFA's are created equal.

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