This enterprise storage market data covers current and future trends for:
- Data storage infrastructure
- Applications and data value
- Flash storage and NVMe
- Software-defined storage
- Public cloud and hybrid cloud storage
Infrastructure, Cloud & DevOps
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At this year’s Dell Tech Summit, there were several high-impact announcements, each one important and each one valuable. But, with each, the real story will be whether these are just single isolated announcements or whether each one can become a first step in a larger journey that helps define Dell and its offerings moving forward.With that, let’s walk through the big announcements.
- Dell Technologies on Demand: In a recent ESG study, a majority of IT organizations identified a preference to procure IT storage infrastructure on a pay-per-use basis. There are still, however, organizations that prefer the traditional model, so IT vendors such as Dell need to offer both options and many do. Dell’s technology breadth, however, should give it an advantage as IT organizations need simplification. The ability to have the same pay-per-use model and agreement across all your IT infrastructure, or even a significant portion, offers tremendous value. This should create significant value, saving personnel from wasting time managing paperwork, while helping reduce the cost of IT. The price can go up or down based on usage, capacity for storage and compute hours for servers. The use of compute hours as a term for servers is really intriguing. IT organizations can spin up and spin down workloads based on need and only pay when they are in use. The terms seem a little long, available in three, four, or five-year options, but this is a move in the right direction. Ideally this announcement is just the first step in Dell simplifying its payment process moving forward.
- Dell PowerOne: Autonomous infrastructure, that is the promise of Dell PowerOne. Even if it’s just a stretch goal, it’s good to hear. The PowerOne platform is a converged offering and its ability to save time and reduce risk via the automation of repetitive tasks is impressive. ESG was able to get a first look at the technology. So far, however, this automation technology is isolated to PowerOne. Does this capability come to other parts of the Dell portfolio? How will Dell bring the ideas of autonomous infrastructure to everything it does? PowerOne is exciting, and now the industry wants to see more.
- Dell’s Moonshot Goals to Deliver Good – Last, in this list, but certainly not least, Michael Dell kicked off this year’s Dell Tech Summit with several moonshot goals for Dell Technologies to achieve by 2030. These goals included a target of one-for-one recycling. For every system Dell builds in 2030 and beyond, it will recycle one system’s worth of components. While ambitious, it is not outside the realm of possibility. Dell already has a massive recycling program in place, and Michael was one of the industry’s earliest proponents of technology recycling. Dell also announced its goal for 50% of the Dell Technologies’ global workforce to be women by 2030, with 40% of the management positions. Again, this is ambitious, especially when you consider the global portion of this goal, but it is excellent to see an industry leader publicly putting a target out there and then actively working towards it.
All these announcements were significant, but ideally each is only a first step. All three address topics that the technology industry and the world at large have vested interests in. As a result, the potential is tremendous. The question Dell has to answer moving forward, however, is will it continue down these trajectories with additional investment, innovation, and commitment? Ideally, every year, Dell could highlight the strides the company has made to simplify IT procurement, automate IT operations, and achieve its moonshot goals, and I, for one, hope they will.
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Hitachi NEXT this year had a new feel about it. Sure, there was some great tech, which we will get to in a minute, but speaking with the attendees and the executives, there was an element of excitement in the air. Hitachi Vantara has already had great tech, but this year, with new innovations for the data center, the cloud, and data ops, there is much more to Hitachi Vantara than in years past. -
This week Pure // Accelerate came to my hometown of Austin, Tx. And for three days, the city was orange; filled with a customer base that is both passionate and enthusiastic. -
The theme of this year’s VMworld is “Make you Mark.” The kickoff keynote delivered a familiar narrative placing the IT leader in the place of a hero, a cross between “Morpheus and Hermione,” gifted with powers to change the world. -
This week, I was in Santa Clara, California for my annual pilgrimage to Flash Memory Summit (FMS). While I was there, I got a few moments during a very busy week to stand in front of a camera with my colleague, Mark Peters, and discuss this year’s summit, as well as the latest news.
Before I get to the new tech, I feel I must address the big question: “Is Flash Memory Summit still as important as it once was?” With flash memory becoming the de facto standard for data storage now, do we need a separate event for flash? Isn’t everything storage-related about flash now?
If you look at the video, you will see a busy show floor packed with attendees. While the show certainly has evolved to more of an internal industry discussion and collaboration on flash, rather than an end-user conference, the conversations at FMS are no less valuable.
Business’s demand for data performance is insatiable. Modern businesses are built on data, and every innovation that reduces the latency involved with data access, whether PCIe 4.0, NVMe, NVMe over fabrics, or persistent memory, offers a valuable edge for IT.
And few workload trends illustrate this incredible demand for data performance more than the rise of machine learning. Nearly half of the keynote presentations at FMS 2019 had some reference to artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning in the title. FMS is not just about flash storage; it is about taking flash to the next level to transform your business.
With all this new technology, there is something missing, though, and not just from FMS but from IT as well. It is appropriate that artificial intelligence was a dominant topic at FMS this year, because it is another type of intelligence that needs to increase its presence in modern IT. What is lacking in modern IT is a sufficient level of detailed workload intelligence at the infrastructure level.
Will the innovations shown at FMS accelerate your application environments? Yes, probably. But by how much, and which investments offer the greatest returns? Should you leverage an NVMe-based storage system? This is probably a no-brainer. But what about persistent memory? What about both? Which will give you the biggest improvement?
Now, flash storage vendors have invested considerable time understanding how their technology will impact different workload environments. The problem, however, is that modern IT organizations often lack a detailed understanding of their own specific workload environments. This creates an intelligence gap. The scale of modern IT is becoming so large and the technology is evolving so rapidly that IT’s lack of the tools and the time necessary to understand the details of their specific workload requirements will likely become a major hurdle to new technology adoption.
There is a wealth of new flash-based technologies poised to transform the data center. There is also a wealth of demand. Workloads, such as machine learning, are fueling a need for the low latency performance that these technologies offer. Seems like a perfect match. It is, just not quite. IT needs better tools to understand their specific workload ecosystems to maximize their return on the flash innovations just over the horizon. Solving this gap will be the difference between achieving an evolutionary, incremental performance improvement and capturing a transformational advantage.
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The Israeli tech news site, Globes, reported today that Amazon is acquiring the NVMe flash storage start-up, E8. The report mentions the deal is estimated to be between $50 and $60 million. However, the article also notes that other sources estimate the deal might have been for less. So, why is Amazon buying E8?
At this time, I have not seen an official statement from Amazon. I speculate, however, that this is a technology, rather than a business, acquisition, something that offers high performance NVMe storage that fits Amazon’s hyperscale architecture. E8’s technology may be delivered as an ultra-fast storage tier. Or Amazon may use the technology in future versions of Outposts. Either presents a fascinating opportunity for Amazon and its customers.
I do not, however, have to speculate on E8’s technology. We at ESG evaluated E8’s technology a couple of years ago.
Here are some of the highlights from our report.
- E8’s design leverages standard, readily available hardware. The solution we validated was a 2U enclosure supplied by an Intel whitebox ODM.
- The E8 solution that ESG validated leveraged RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) for high performance, low latency storage network performance.
- The E8 client software on the host server handles multi-pathing, including path failover, and can accommodate dual Ethernet switches for network redundancy. This technology means Amazon doesn’t have to wait for NVMe multi-pathing support to solidify.
- E8 delivers incredibly efficient storage performance. In our testing, E8’s software, along with the RoCE protocol, added only about 10us of additional latency in a host request on an NVMe drive. The 2U E8-D24 storage array was able to deliver over 10 million IOPS for a 100% random read workload and over 43 GB/sec of throughput for large block read operations.
What does this mean going forward?
Amazon got a solid, high performance storage technology that, if the article’s estimate is accurate, was still relatively cheap. I assume that given E8’s start-up nature, Amazon does not have a ton of established on-premises customers to support. When I compare this to Google’s move for Elastifile that I wrote about few weeks prior, there are both similarities and differences.
In both cases, a public cloud service provider acquired an on-premises focused storage startup to augment their storage offerings. This alone could change the storage market; there is a new crop of tech buyers out there. It will be interesting to see if the venture capital community gets more bullish of storage startups.
From the outside, Elastifile makes slightly more sense. Both are excellent technologies, but high-performance scale-out file systems are incredibly complex to build and could be considered a weakness among current cloud storage portfolios. While E8’s performance efficiency is stellar, Amazon might have been able to build something similar, or good enough, by leveraging newer hardware with some adjustments to their existing technology.
Does E8 represent a strategy shift at Amazon from build to buy for storage technologies? Or is the rising interest in high performance workloads, such as machine learning, driving Amazon to seek out performance advantages wherever it can? Time will offer more insight. In the meantime, E8 is solid technology and I expect Amazon to put it to good use.
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The technology industry moves at a blistering pace. New shining stars of innovation emerge constantly. And leaders that once dominated the market landscape can quickly get pushed to the wayside.If HPE Discover 2019 showed me anything, it is that HPE will not be pushed around or aside. The company that has long claimed to be built on innovation has found its footing. HPE Discover 2019 was HPE’s message to the IT industry that the innovation has never stopped.
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ESG’s Master Survey Results provide the complete output of syndicated research surveys in graphical format. In addition to the data, these documents provide background information on the survey, including respondent profiles at an individual and organizational level. It is important to note that these documents do not contain analysis of the data.
This Master Survey Results presentation focuses on the current process and technology approaches to hybrid cloud strategies, including striking the right balance of on- and off-premises workloads.
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Digital transformation takes many forms. Nearly every company wants to maximize the value of its data, but each has specific goals in mind. When IT vendors discuss transformation, however, their story often sounds the same: “Build from the data center out.”While that approach is valuable, for a variety of industries, the Internet of Things (IoT) and the edge are the real keys to maximizing an organization’s digital future. IoT can no longer be ignored. According to recent ESG research, 36% of IT organizations indicated that they have IoT initiatives already underway. (more…)
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Every technology event or conference offers insight into the future of IT. Few, however, rival the breadth of digital business impact or the passion among the attendees that Red Hat displayed this week. After only a few hours on the floor and talking with attendees, I am reassured not only that IBM is making a wise move with the acquisition, but also that Red Hat is incredibly well positioned to address the challenges of modern IT.
At this year’s Dell Tech Summit, there were several high-impact announcements, each one important and each one valuable. But, with each, the real story will be whether these are just single isolated announcements or whether each one can become a first step in a larger journey that helps define Dell and its offerings moving forward.
Hitachi NEXT this year had a new feel about it. Sure, there was some great tech, which we will get to in a minute, but speaking with the attendees and the executives, there was an element of excitement in the air. Hitachi Vantara has already had great tech, but this year, with new innovations for the data center, the cloud, and data ops, there is much more to Hitachi Vantara than in years past.
This week Pure // Accelerate came to my hometown of Austin, Tx. And for three days, the city was orange; filled with a customer base that is both passionate and enthusiastic.
The theme of this year’s VMworld is “Make you Mark.” The kickoff keynote delivered a familiar narrative placing the IT leader in the place of a hero, a cross between “Morpheus and Hermione,” gifted with powers to change the world. 
The Israeli tech news site, Globes, 
Today, Google Cloud 
The technology industry moves at a blistering pace. New shining stars of innovation emerge constantly. And leaders that once dominated the market landscape can quickly get pushed to the wayside.
Digital transformation takes many forms. Nearly every company wants to maximize the value of its data, but each has specific goals in mind. When IT vendors discuss transformation, however, their story often sounds the same: “Build from the data center out.”
Every technology event or conference offers insight into the future of IT. Few, however, rival the breadth of digital business impact or the passion among the attendees that Red Hat displayed this week. After only a few hours on the floor and talking with attendees, I am reassured not only that IBM is making a wise move with the acquisition, but also that Red Hat is incredibly well positioned to address the challenges of modern IT.