Gartner: Dell nowhere to be seen as storage SSD sales go flat Well, here's another nail in the coffin for traditional storage arrays; Gartner claims array SSD sales were up just one per cent year-on-year, while server flash sales grew 51 per cent. EMC leads the AFA players, while Cisco and Dell are nowhere. Total enterprise SSD revenue is 2014 was $5.77bn, up 30 per cent year-on-year. …
Has Gartner revised the AFA category? If I remember correctly, Gartner excludes all arrays that even have the possibility of having anything else than flash in them. I know that HDS and Dell do have AFA arrays, but they are penalized because they also allow customer to add spinning disks if they want to.
So as long as Gartner does not revise their definition, I think articles like this one can safely be ignored.
The numbers don't appear to make sense; the SSD Array market (presumably this means all-flash market) rose only 1%, yet EMC went from $74m to $444m, with plenty of other vendors increasing share? Am I misreading something?
Again, excluding vendors that can ship traditional disk in an AFA makes no sense as the likely wider market is hybrid. It would be better to track flash as a percentage of the array capacity as an indicator of the success of the flash market.
Hi all, Dimitris from NetApp (http://recoverymonkey.org).
This is an accounting issue. How does one track AFA sales? For Pure it's easy, everything is AFA.
From EMC, XtremIO is always an AFA. Easy to count.
For NetApp, when this report was run only EF was an AFA, and AFF (All-Flash FAS) wasn't counted since up till now there wasn't a strict all-flash FAS model that actually doesn't work with HDD. The reality is NetApp sells huge amounts of SSD... as do many other vendors.
For example, for HDS the story is similar, I bet they sell a shedload of flash yet aren't high on the chart.
Gotta love it.
Thx
D
Dell resells and/or leverages all the listed manufactures drive tech across many product lines including SAN/NAS storage and servers.
Dell does over $60 Billion dollars of business a year (as of last public results from FY2014).
It's not only safe to assume that Dell sells more than $50M in flash, it probably spends more than $50M a year just on styrofoam to pack the flash arrays it does sell for shipping.
(Disclaimer: Full Time Dell Employee)
Dell ships AFA's, but Gartner will not include those numbers as long as it's possible to add spinning drives to the solution. Even All Flash (EqualLogic) PS-Series arrays, like the PS6210S with 24SSD and no room to expand within the chassis is not counted as AFA, since customers might add other arrays with spinning drives into the same management ecosystem. Equally, if you just bought a (sub $15k) SCv2020 AFA, it will not count, as you are able to add spinning drives in the future...
In my (not Dells) view, this makes this Gartner report misleading, confusing and customer unfriendly.
I have to agree with the interpretation of the data. All of Dell's storage options allow for Spinning disks and SSDs in the same box. I know we sold several million in SSDs on the Dell Storage Center Array's last year so I know Dell had a lot more than 50m is sales of SSDs. They always had some type of spinning disk for Tier3 or they were upgrades from current spinning disk solutions to SSDs without a second of customer downtime. I would read this more as a statement, that most customers expect to have a combination of the two and not just SSDs by themselves.
It's Gartner's nonsense classifications, as a few others have mentioned. It's forced HP to have a couple of models that are AFAs in name only, purely so Gartner will count them. There is no difference between the 7440 and 7450 from a controller perspective but the 7450 is the only one Gartner will count,
That Gartner Group chose to have an all flash category and refused to measure AFA sales correctly was to their detriment.
Dell doesn't register in this because Dell's AFA's can also - should the customer choose - have spinning disk, for lower tier data.
Personally, I see this as an advantage in design, but that's beside the point.
HP threw in the towel and launched a completely different model number, which ironically has the same controllers.
The criteria should be
(1) is the array sold as an all-flash array, without spinning disk? Then count it.
(2) don't count the sale in any other category
Total enterprise SSD revenue (2014) = $5.77bn:
- storage SSD revenue = $1.8bn
- server SSD revenue = $3.9bn
- total AFA 2014 revenue = $1.4bn
From the numbers presented in the article one should conclude SSD revenue in hybrid arrays was $0.4bn. With the biggest AFA players all showing significant growth one can assume flash revenue is shifting fast from hybrid arrays to AFAs and servers.
*I did not confirm the numbers Chris presented here - just commenting on my read of them
So Gartner uses an arbitrary and rather skewed method of measurement, thereby offering an opportunity for a controversial and mis-leading headline.
I am more interested in El Reg debunking myths, and not promoting them - this is a non-article.
(... It should cease to be.
It should curl up its tootsies and join the bleedin' choir invisibule
etc., etc.,)
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