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Tiering up: Our man struggles to make sense of the storage landscape

Data Retention for Dummies

Super Groups

My thinking is that a new, larger and stable first tier of suppliers are emerging. This is a group of 13 enterprise on-premises storage suppliers formed from two sub-groups.

Sub-group one are the traditional incumbents and they are too weak to knock out the upstarts. Sub-group two are the upstarts and they are not strong enough to knock out the incumbents, and nor will they become so.

Some of the incumbents may weaken further (thinking of you, IBM) and fall into a second storage supplier group tier, formed from startups and post-IPO suppliers that haven’t become tier one suppliers and may or may not become tier one suppliers. Actifio and Delphix should be included here.

What qualifies a supplier to be in tier one? We can suppose it has at least a billion dollar run rate or a distinct prospect of achieving that (this is a bit rough and ready, with gut feel contributing).

There are also a new generation of startups with on-premises storage ambition – Cohesity and Rubrik are examples.

This article isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list of suppliers, just a set of examples, so don't shoot me if your favourite one isn’t included.

What about the future?

It looks to include servers with persistent memory, 3D XPoint for example, external all-flash arrays on a PCIe-speed NVMe fabric, and, even further out, decoupled compute and storage.

There you have it, an attempt at a Dummy’s Guide to the Primary and Secondary Storage Array Landscape. Stick your thoughts in a comment if you think I’m talking rubbish. Tell me where I’ve gone wrong, because my name is Jon Snow, and, as someone once said over and over again in the Game of Storage Thrones, “You know nothing, Jon Snow.” ®

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