Spending on storage systems has remained virtually level for number of years, seemingly unaffected by the significant changes in the market mix of raw storage devices. My Figure above shows spending trends on storage systems, spinning disk drives, NAND solid state disk and DRAM memory devices. In the year to the end of June 2019 the market was worth $33.1b and in the second quarter $8.1b – down 2% and 8% respectively on the previous annual period.One reason for this is that raw storage is used in many types of other product, most notably DRAM in PCs and mobile devices, NAND storage in PCs and mobile devices and all of these devices in self-built storage systems by cloud suppliers and others; also the direct attached storage (DAS) built into a smaller server has never been classified as storage system. The proliferation of software to manage and control storage in servers and simple arrays shows the extent to which the market has moved away from requiring a conventional vendor to pre-integrate storage systems for use by enterprise customers. It is no longer the case that users entrust their mission critical data solely to experienced vendors with a long history of reliability and technical storage system know-how. This is not to say that these traditional vendors do not play a vital role in the current market, not least because most are pursuing ‘software-defined’ strategies of their own, as I’ve outlined in many posts I publish sponsored by IBM.
Nevertheless there is still an important market for storage system vendors (market shares for which in the last year I show in my Figure above). Dell’s acquisition of the market leader EMC increased the combined company’s market share, which stood at 30.2% in the year. HPE – spun off from HP Inc. and acquisitive of 3Par, Nimble and SImplivity – took second place, with an 11.3% share. NetApp is a comparative new-comer; it has managed to grow its business to take third place, based on its mastery of Network Attached Storage (NAS) and its OnTap software. Huawei has expanded its business into the enterprise market globally over the last few years and now stands in forth position with a 6.9% share – ahead of IBM, which took 4.7% of this hardware market. Almost all of the storage system vendors are also contributing their arrays to converged infrastructure and hyper-converged infrastructure systems – a product type that grew tremendously in 2018.
Looking forward the storage market will remain vital to the computer industry and will go through a number of other extreme changes as memory class storage closes the significant cost and speed differences between memory used close to the processor and the storage, which will no longer necessitate an entirely different method of handling. Security in the form of encryption is being built into a number of arrays (IBM’s most notably) and will become more vital as streaming applications based on containers such as docker expand and governments introduce privacy regulations requiring personal data to be protected. It’s going to be an interesting ride!
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