 |
|
| leading the way to the new
storage frontier |
..... | |
| |
| ..... |
now consider this...
90% of the enterprise SSD companies which
you know have no good reasons to survive.
The main reasons they will hang around a little longer and their ranks
may even swell slightly before the big shrink are bad reasons...
Bad
marketing and an inefficient market.by
Zsolt Kerekes,
editor - StorageSearch.com,
April 21, 2015
drivers, mechanisms and routes towards
consolidation in the enterprise SSD market along with some other outrageous and
dangerous ideas
However you interact with the enterprise SSD ecosystem a
useful reference point for judging the relevance of what you see happening
around you is some kind of implicit background expectation about the size and
structure of the market - which at its simplest level is measured by the number
of distinctly different vendors and major product types and economic value of
the whole market.
As a commentator on the future of the enterprise SSD
market since before the
modern era of SSDs
I've played an active part in setting expectations about the long term growth
prospects in the market - measured by vendor count, significantly different
product types, and revenue ceilings.
We're now nearing a pivotal
point in the enterprise SSD market where the long held assumptions I helped to
encourage (especially how many leading systems vendors there will be in the
market at the same time) are about to change dramatically.
The
changes in customer thinking has already begun. But it will take about 5 or
6 years for all the effects to ripple through. That seems like a long way away.
But take it from me - users would make these changes more quickly if they
could.
That's the impression I've got from prepublication
conversations.
The ideas in this article could be a catalyst to
speed up the urgency of change in user thinking. If you want to skip ahead -
scroll down to the headline - "Now imagine this..."
why
now?
Why will the enterprise SSD market change from a game played
concurrently on the same wide open range by hundreds of vendors (if you can
be bothered to count them) and which yet still manages to satisfy the
egotistical aspirations of so many self styled winners (can they all be
right?) this beloved wild spirited contact sport of ours (which
vendors can't
afford not to take part in) maybe it's better to ask not just "why"
but also "how" would it ever change into a sedate board
game resembling something more like bridge crossed with chess - in which
every space on the table will be precisely ordered and precious and the player
seats themselves and cushions will have to be reserved years in advance?
Makes
me feel a little sad and nostalgic even thinking about it.
As to the
why? Whatever you may think about mergers and acquisitions and suchlike
behavior that's got very little to do with it.
The real pressure for
change comes from 3 sources:-
- changes in user behavior
It's always been true that SSD
users change their behavior as they learn from their own experience in deploying
SSDs. The lessons they learn after 2 or 3 deployment generations help them to
conceptualize for themselves what they can expect to get done better from SSDs.
In earlier phases of the enterprise market (2007 to 2010) it was difficult
for users to disentangle the individual contributory causes of successes and
failures as there were too many changing variables in technology.
When
it came to performance modeling for examples - users couldn't be certain
how much of the disruptive changes such as memory types (RAM to SLC to MLC
etc), computer architecture (including placement of SSDs in server vs SAN), and
successive software generations (emulation of HDD arrays, caching of legacy
storage, bypassing legacy application stacks) etc could be considered as a
onetime improvement as opposed to being part of a predictable and scalable
activity. Most vendors didn't know either. Or if they thought they did - they
didn't necessarily agree about what had been achieved, the best way to do it or
the direction of future change. And comparisons between vendors were problematic
for users in the early days flash arrays when there were too few products to
compare.
growing user awareness from experience of similar things
The
educational makeup
of the SSD user base has changed.
It has moved away from being a
market in which most users had little or no experience of using mission
critical SSDs towards one in which most users already have had several
generations of deployments with SSDs. Or they can read about others like them
who do have this experience.
Users are applying the lessons they have
learned - the good about the technology along with the bad about the
predictability and reliability of vendor continuity roadmaps.
Users
now realize that in their own self interest they have much to gain from
abstracting the benefits they get away from the diverse feature sets of any
single supplier towards a minimalist set of common must-have features in 2 or 3
distinct SSD box types which will satisfy all their needs while giving them
independence from failed or greedy suppliers.
Web scale companies have
been following these types of abstraction strategies for years as many were
already well down the road to double digit Nth generation SSD deployments. At
their scales their economic options included creating some of the missing links
in software for their own uses and their own special applications needs.
For
most enterprises - IT is a tool and not their primary business - so the
investment in home grown SSD virtualization and management tools would be nuts -
given the massive degree of risk and changeability in the market. But software
is a part of the solution.
- the emergence of new software solutions which can satisfy common
management functions in a scalable fashion and in a way which is credible over
multiple product generations.
It's reasonable to ask why isn't there
already a better availability of industry wide useful enterprise software
which can replace and abstract away the mish mash of different chaotic
patches, tools and feature sets which arise in the systems products of SSD box
makers and which are sometimes as different to other products from the same
supplier in different product generations as they are different to those from
other suppliers.
The reasons are...
The enterprise SSD
software market started
chaotically with independent parallel developments in multiple places, and
without a common core idea of unification or longevity related roadmaps.
It
hasn't been going long. The first useful enterprise SSD software products
emerged in 2009.
Most early SSD software vendors didn't accomplish very much before
they got acquired. The SSD makers who acquired them were in most cases
looking for simple tools to make their current product lines easier to sell
rather than as the basis for industry-wide platforms which cut across multiple
product types and generations. There were some exceptions - but there's more to
SSD software than caching and virtualizing different types of SSDs.
Until
recently the entire enterprise SSD market hasn't been big enough to attract the
scale of investments needed to deliver industry-wide abstraction tools. So the
business case for this type of solution has been risky.
Where will
such solutions come from?
Some of the solutions may come from the
future work of companies like
FalconStor and
Primary Data while
another center of gravity is in the application server type of SSD box and the
mainstream SDS market which includes companies like
Maxta. But the
application server is only one orbit in the enterprise architecture solar
system not the whole big bang.
SDS vendors who want to take
advantage of this consolidation trend will have to extend their data reach to
support other box types (not just more of their own).
Other possible
entry directions for newcomers into this market include existing box companies -
who may determine that abandoning their original business plans as systems
companies and morphing into software business entities (or spinning off their
software divisions) is a better option than retaining the characteristics of a
combined systems business in which the software side is unable to leverage
from user experiences and revenue contributions from outside the core box
brand.
And other directions from which we may expect to see newcomers
enter this aspect of the software market are:- the productization and
repurposing of cloud and webscale software which already exists, and of course
- new start ups. But the
funding of pure play
startups will likely have to be billion dollar plus - because it takes a lot of
software to support enough different products and functions to be useful.
what limits the shape of the future consolidated market?
What
will limit the shape of the future consolidated market? An underlying
architectural pull due to the clumpiness of data gravity within a belly
girdled tightly by cost economics with recognizable internal SSD
organs which are maintained by the heartbeat of software.
I'm
kidding. We know exactly what it will look like. We've known for years.
All
future needs in the enterprise can be satisfied by a small number of distinctly
different SSD products determined by latency and distance from the application
server.
I described the basic product types in my 2012 article -
an introduction to
enterprise SSD silos.
If you haven't read that article - the simple
summary is that there are only about 5 types of SSD box or appliance needed to
satisfy all requirements. (And most organizations can get by using as little as
3 of these.)
- The application server.
(That's the server or cluster of SDS servers which run your app.)
- The SAN box. (That's a
storage box which sits outside the apps server).
There are 3 main types of SAN box - which are different by virtue of
latency and the related cost of their raw capacity. The 3 types are:- fast,
fast-enough and archive.
- The
SSD ASAP
(auto tiering / caching appliance - sometimes integrated in a hybrid and even as
a micro hybrid inside the apps server) is a box or software layer which
intermediates between any 2 vastly different latencies which are in your
environment.
Within every one of these top level box products there is
also the business possibility to differentiate these latency based product
segments by internal SSD controller architecture and external interface port
connectivity.
There are only
2 types of SSD
controller architecture which are relevant in this market transition
context.
Big controller - in which the base level controller
management assumptions can be sure of working with large numbers of flash
devices (hundreds or thousands). Examples of such products being
Violin's
VIMM based 6000/7000 ,
IBM's
FlashSystem,
EMC's
Extremio,
Skyera's (now HGST's)
skyHawk,
Virident's (now HGST's)
FlashMax,
Fusion-io's (now
SanDisk's) ioMemory
etc.
When they can keep pace with memory advances these controller
architectures typically outperform arrays of standard SSDs. But the difficulties
of supporting new memory types (in particular the demands of
adaptive DSP)
has meant that all but one of the big architecture controller makers have given
up the challenge of native support for cheapest memories and instead rely on
more expensive memory - typically some kind of branded
eMLC.
The market result has been for most of these controllers to congregate at the
faster end of the
speed segments in SSD box space.
Small controller - in
which the base level controller management assumptions can only be sure of
working with small numbers of flash devices - typically in the region from 3 to
10. Examples of such products include most (but not all) of the SSDs which you
would regard as "standard" commercial off the shelf (COTS) SSDs -
having SAS or
SATA interfaces.
The benefits of this approach ffrom the user perspective is that
arrays of such products benefit from "crowd based intelligence" re
advances in flash memory design. This group of SSDs tends to be among the
earliest to be able to deploy cheaper kinds of memory within enterprise boxes.
The main disadvantage of arrays of small architecture SSDs used to be
intrinsically lower utilization
efficiency.
This
was because the controller is unaware of what is happening in flash chips in
other SSDs which are outside its own reach but within the same array. An
emerging trend in software pioneered by webscale entities (such as
Baidu)
has been to switch off some of the flash management done in the SSD's
controller and. by using custom application specific APIs to manage some key
functions from the applications server. These techniques can reduce the
original gaps in efficiency between small and large controller arrays.
So
for each main box type the core flash array can be either:- small or large
controller type (standard COTS array or proprietary array if you prefer). No
one type appeals to all users.
And the market has developed with
multiple similar designs competing in each product type (overlaid with many
different shapes of the SSD ASAP intermediation products).
And each
of these came with their own software. These are some of the reasons the market
has been complicated and tolerated (you might say suffered)
many different designs
upto now. And we will still need the same number of distinct box types in the
future.
But even if you allow for the diversity of having 2 or 3
different key suppliers dominating each SSD box type in the future with maybe a
couple of cost differentiated #2, #3 companies in each latency segment - then
by the time we get to 2021 (which is about the time it will take for the new
software to enable consolidation) the total of distinctly different suppliers
in an efficient market will be a lot less companies than we have now.
warning!
- boundary analysis meets consolidation
In the discussions I had
with readers to test my ideas about understanding the transitions towards a
consolidated market I talked through some simple thought exercises.
I
use a simple trick I call
boundary
analysis - which helps me understand and predict market behavior in future
markets even when the products being analyzed and the architecture use cases
don't yet exist.
Now imagine this... you're considering a new
alternate supplier of enterprise SSD storage
You're the top level
person who decides what type of SSD boxes your organization buys. Maybe your job
title includes words like "logistics", "systems architect",
and your industry could be banking, cloud infrastructure, broadcast,
manufacturing. Doesn't matter. These conversations go the same way.
We're
talking because you're thinking about switching to a new supplier. Maybe you've
got a strong candidate in mind, or maybe you've got a list of 10 possibles which
you want to refine down. If you've got a strong candidate of one company, I add
some more to make it more like a list.
Why are you looking at
alternatives? You tell me. But there are many possible reasons.
Maybe
you don't think your current supplier offers the best fit for what you do.
Maybe you like the products you're buying now but anticipate changes in your
supplier which might not be guaranteed to go in the direction which suits you.
Maybe your supplier has been acquired. Maybe they're greedy and bundling in
things you don't value or feel you should be paying for. It doesn't matter.
You've bought lots of SSD boxes before. They're essential for your IT
infrastructure. But you don't want to be exposed to the
whims of the
enterprise SSD next product casino. You want to take control of your own future.
So
we're looking at a list of 10 well known suppliers of flash arrays. For
simplicity let's call them SAN boxes. (IP SAN or FC SAN doesn't matter. The
point is they're not the servers which run your apps.) They are all used by
sane, sensible enterprise customers - so we're not worried about them not
working.
Probably you've spent days already (or weeks) going through
the features, which types of SSDs are inside the arrays etc, etc.
Now
line them all up again in your mind.
Now imagine that every single one
of these products is actually the same hardware. And when I say the same - I
mean the same. Exactly the same hardware box - just a bunch of COTS SAS SSDs,
or SATA SSDs or array of something else. They are all exactly the same. In one
discussion like this we also replaced Violin and IBM proprietary arrays too.
Now what are the differences you see? And why would you buy from one
vendor rather than another?
At its simplest - the main differences
are:-
But I haven't finished yet.
Remember
those SSD boxes from all those different vendors?
Let's put them back
to their original state. So the boxes from Pure, or IBM or HP or EMC or Nimbus
or Violin or (the lists I've discussed with real users include a longer cast of
well known characters)... these boxes are all different again.
Sigh of
relief from some of you out there in SSD vendor land.
Now line them up
in your head.
Now imagine that they all come with exactly the same
software.
Now what are the factors which would lead you to
preferentially choose one supplier over another?
It's good to start
thinking about this. But I don't want you to spend too long on it because I
forgot to mention that you also have to pretend - they all use the same hardware
too. Oh and you can get the same services for all of them too - either branded
by the company you buy from - or from a well known third party.
Where
does that leave us- when nearly all the hardware boxes you buy are actually the
same box inside, and all the software and services which you find useful (as
opposed to being thrown into the feature set) are the same too?
You
don't need hundreds of different products. You never did - it's just that
they looked different because every vendor was doing something very similar but
keeping you captive with their different software, services and marketing.
You
still need the small double digit number of different products which are
differentiated by latency and distance from the apps server. But you don't need
10 different versions of each one. You only need:- a standard array, a
proprietary array, and some cost differentiated #2 and #3 companies in each
segment. That's it.
The hardest to source missing piece to get us to
that state of the market are (as described above) is software.
But you
say - what about the hardware?
Oh yeah. Well here's the interesting
thing. When I started having these discussions which imagined replacing all the
different SSD boxes with the same box - it was months before
SanDisk launched its
InfiniFlash
system. BTW The no frills, standard array of COTS SSDs isn't a new idea. But
the market is different now. And the big difference is user education and the
confidence of experienced users to abstract their own needs away from the
plethora of junk which gets attached to many product lines in the deluded idea
that more technical features make a better product.
When I having these
conversations after the InfiniFlash launch it gave me a convenient reference
point - but it made no real difference to how users thought about their future
plans - compared with a "hypothetical" array replacing all the branded
boxes.
Users I spoke to liked the idea and were already starting to
make plans about a hypothetical white box style of enterprise SSD being in their
futures. That didn't mean they would run out and buy an InfiniFlash box to
replace an EMC or Pure box today - but it did mean that they now regarded all
branded boxes as white boxes with proprietary bits added. And they were actively
engaged at looking how they could use minimal branded feature sets in future
deployments so as to ease their own transitions towards infrastructure in which
the software, and services would be distinct products sources elsewhere - and
not just a mash of bundled things which accidentally came with that product from
that supplier.
And that means, incidentally, that they're not willing
to pay the same high prices to their existing suppliers - because they are
viewing them in a different way.
The enterprise SSD market is now big
enough as an ecosystem to enable software and services vendors to think viable
and sustainable thoughts about creating products which disentangle the bundles
which have been appearing in SSD storage boxes in the past 6 years.
Bad
marketing and an inefficient market
Going back to the "imagine
this" scenarios above - the main reason we have so many products in the
market today is that the enterprise flash market has been a very inefficient
market up to now. Most vendors do things badly from the user interest point of
view (and from the viewpoint of their own investors).
Despite that many have done OK as SSD businesses despite being bad
at marketing for the simple reason - they didn't need to be any better to get
where they are now.
Even a badly marketed and suboptimal fit
enterprise SSD deployment could deliver outstanding
user value
propositions for users whose infrastructures mostly comprised
traditional HDD array and servers.
Most enterprise SSD revenue until
recent years has come from SSDs replacing something else. It hasn't been
necessary for SSD box makers to be good at SSD vs SSD marketing wars.
Getting
the marketing right from the user perspective is difficult for a disruptive
market like enterprise flash. I've discussed some aspects of this in
Decloaking
hidden segments in the enterprise for rackmount SSDs but that article
describes symptoms rather than causes.
why bad marketing?
Bad
marketing is the absence of good marketing. And bad enterprise SSD marketing is
the norm seen nearly everywhere in the market today. It's diiifuclt for me to
pick our the good examples becaue they're intertwined with bad even in the same
product launches.
The root cause is it takes years to construct a
marketing organization which works well at large scale.
And the
pipeline of activities which need to be done to create the right products,
educate and motivate the people inside your own organization and outside who
have an influence, and factor in all the business impacts on your current
products and competitors and partners is a very complex science. I call it a
science because a lot of research and analysis has been done on what works and
why.
It costs a lot of money to invest in training, and it takes a lot
of time and commitment to make good adaptive marketing work. Hardly
surprising you don't see much evidence of this in our industry.
Most
big vendors in the market today have strategic SSD product lines which were
sourced from outside by
licensing or
acquisition. The marketers they acquire from small companies may be good at
technical marketing or good enough to manage startups but lack the product
management skills to activate the mammoths which acquired them.
And
the current start ups in the business lack the marketing skills and the
financial success they need to scale up their ambitions.
You already
know it takes many years before a new enterprise software product becomes safe
and useful to use in big scale rollouts. Now consider that the creation of that
software and the idea of where it would fit in with the ecosystem 5 years after
the version 1.0 launch are all actually a subset of a product management
portfolio which someone should have been thinking about years ago. But of course
that didn't happen.
It never could have happened in our industry.
The next thing in a disruptive market is not just a predictable follow-on from
what happened before. But as the market gets more predictable - it will become
more sensible to make such investments.
how much is better SSD
marketing worth?
I often write about the contributions to
efficiency that can be obtained from different types of design tricks.
The same goes for marketing.
In an inefficient market like we've had
until now it didn't matter if a vendor sold a few percent more or less of a
new system. It was easy to get sales and the total market size was small. But
we're moving towards a market in 2020/21 where it will harder to get sales
without being good at marketing and where each 1% difference in outcomes could
be worth around $1 billion of revenue. That will be the reward for those who are
still in the game at that time.
I'm not going to make any prediction
about where the "good marketing" in enterprise SSD will come from. But
one day when the technology differences don't matter anymore and when it's as
easy for users to change their enterprise SSD box infrastructure as it is to
change their PCs the SSD market will be very different.
We've got
interesting times ahead though as we try to spot where the enterprise SSD
software decoupling platforms are coming from.
summary
The
enterprise SSD systems market is entering a phase where easy revenue growth
opportunities which vendors experienced before due in large part to displacing
older technologies will disappear. Future competition will be more like SSD on
SSD.
The user base will change in the way it views SSD vendors as the
market moves towards an ecosystem in which most user organizations have
experience and confidence in deploying flash and managing it.
As a
result of those experiences the traditional enterprise will adopt some of the
strategies which we have already seen in the earliest big SSD adopters - a
willingness to abstract their own needs and best interests away from dependence
on solution types which they will increasingly view as being variations
around a small group of possible white boxes which vary simply according to
latency and distance from the application - as bundled architecture samples
rather than as architecture types.
Meanwhile the size of the enterprise
SSD ecosystem will encourage the emergence of new types of suppliers who offer
software products which can support the long term vision of users and help
migrate them away from the dependencies they don't feel are worthwhile.
footnote
- re InfiniFlash
In the article above I mentioned that I used
SanDisk's InfiniFlash as a convenient example of a white box in some of my
prepublication conversations about this article. And in the months before the
InfiniFlash launch I was just talking about a white box SSD with similar
characteristics.
It didn't make any difference to the willingness of
the users I spoke to when it came to their engagement with the ideas. What
was interesting though was how willing some users were in thinking about
an InfiniFlash style of box in their plans as replacements a branded storage
system. If not now then soon.
The transition strategy would involve
reducing their future dependence on bundled software features in branded systems
- even if all the ingredients aren't available now to move everything to white
box. So they're already thinking of the branded systems as supersets of white
boxes.
I'm not saying that the InfiniFlash product is a good or bad
product.
It's just a well known example in a trend which will grow.
And if you ask me about how good or bad the marketing of this product
was? I have spoken to various marketers at SanDisk about this aspect.
Their
enterprise marketing has improved a lot in recent years but it's still closer
to the norm which is bad rather than anywhere near approaching good. This is
due to their newness of being in the market and the other common factors I
mentioned above. I could give you a list of other companies which have been in
the enterprise storage market for a very long time and which and are also bad
at marketiing enterprise SSD systems too.
any questions?
Some
vendors may be unhappy with the ideas expressed in the above article -
especially the dangerous notion that almost everything they do from a technology
point of view and all the treasured things they stuff into their boxes don't
equate to flash array heirlooms which their customers will continue to
care about.
Before you send me such emails and complaints let me just
say that adapting to the changing needs of your customers and anticipating what
they need next, and next and after next, is part of what good marketing is
about - and if you were doing it well - you'd be the ones who wrote this
article - not me. | | |
.. |
 |
.. |
Consolidation?
Just to clarify what I mean. |
Almost immediately
after publishing the blog you see above - I knew that some people people who
only read it quickly without understanding the concepts would say something
like...
Aha - we know what that means! Just as we suspected - the
number of enterprise SSD systems companies is about to collapse - so we can
expect to see less in the next few quarters than in the past.
Which is
not exactly what I meant.
In the medium term... A reduction? Yes.
And
in the long term - a 90% reduction / collapse in distinctly different systems
boxes - compared to what we see in the market today (in Q2 2015)? Certainly.
But
the number of companies participating in the market will get bigger for a short
time - for at least a year - before a steady decline followed by a sharp
collapse.
That's because some pieces which are needed to lubricate
these gritty changes aren't available yet and where they are - the products are
naive, the marketing is unsophisticated and the business units are under
resourced.
Aside from the obvious vendors which will immediately
benefit from the changes (such as software companies of the type mentioned in
the article) we can also expect to see new systems companies entering the market
too. (Even as we head towards a converging market.)
That's because
the TAM is huge and a changing market creates new opportunities.
In
one of the many prepublication conversations I had about these concepts
the person I was talking to said he was so inspired that he was going to
launch his own new rackmount SSD systems company instead of doing something
very significant with another vendor. ...read
more here | | |
.. |
comments related to this
article
"Always thoughtful Zsolt. Few have the credibility to
write this" - Woody Hutsell,
IBM.
"Zsolt,
this is an insightful article that shows your vast experience and unique
position in the industry" - Morgan Littlewood, Founder
at Kodiak Data
"Hi Zsolt, Definitely a lot to think about there, and
hopefully in the future we'll be able to show that we paid attention to your
observations and steered the business in the right direction…" -
Director, Marketing at a Top 10 SSD company.
"Hello
Zsolt, I was so inspired after our call yesterday (which discussed concepts in
the consolidation article) that I decided to launch my own Flash SSD company."
VP Storage at a major worldwide corporation | |
.. |
| Hmm... it looks like you're seriously
interested in SSDs. So please bookmark our
home page and come back again
soon. |
|
about the publisher -
guiding the enterprise since 1991 | |
.... |
 |
.... |
 |
| this town ain't big enough for the two of us |
.... |
SSD news
SSD market
history
can you
trust SSD market data?
what's RAM really? - RAM in the
Memoryfication Era |
.. |
|
|
.. |
|
|
.. |
 Was
there ever a Golden Heroic Age of the Enterprise SSD market?
and could
the plot of the enterprise SSD story have been
rewritten
with different characters to make it simpler? |
.. |
 |
..
..
..
.. |
| "When a startup shuts
down and weve had several such instances in the recent past everyone
sympathises with the entrepreneur. Which is fair - he lost his company. Whats
amusing is how no one thinks of the VC who lost all his money and got nothing in
return except a certificate of - You dont know how to make a good investment. |
Shephali Bhatt,
Principal Correspondent at - the
Economic Times - in her blog -
It's
hard to be a VC, harder to be his wife (July 27, 2016)
see
also:- VCs in SSDs | | |
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
.. |
If you could go back in
time and take with you a load of memory chips and SSDs from today
(along with compatible adapters so they could plug and play) how would that
change the world?
Now how about the other way round?
What if you could
bring back SSDs and memory accelerators from the future? |
| what's the value
of infinitely faster RAM?
| | |
..
..
..
..
..
.. |
| Smaller nuances of user
behavior (which are easier to discern as patterns in a stable market) easily get
lost under the noise created by headline technology changes and the market's
apparent willingness to slaughter and discard once loved past industry leaders.
|
| Decloaking
hidden SSD segments in the enterprise | | |
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
 .. |
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
|
| When you read something
about the SSD market which you didn't know before - or which seems to
contradict something which you previously held as a working hypothesis - what do
you do next?
|
| can you
trust SSD market data? | | |
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
.. |
|
|
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
.. |
|
|
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
|
|
|
..
..
..
..
.. |
"Why cant you just
install a new storage solution from a different vendor, migrate data from
existing storage to new storage, decommission existing storage, and move on?
The reasons for storage vendor lock-in are twofold.
The
first is storage management lock-in...
The second reason is data
management lock-in....
Two emerging technologies, and more importantly
the synergy between them, may provide the relief from storage vendor lock-in in
virtualized server environments." |
| Storage
Vendor Lock-in – is the End Near? - a blog by Yoram Novick,
founder Maxta
(August 15, 2015) | | |
..
..
..
..
.. |
| "A critical test of
whether you really understand the dynamics of a complex market like enterprise
SSDs - is whether you can predict what rational buyers might do when offered new
product options at the extreme limits of - for example - price." |
| Boundaries
Analysis in SSD Market Forecasting | | |
..
..
..
.. |
| Unlike before - today new
companies entering the market can rely on a sophisticated SSD ecosystem - in
which key elements of their solutions are already being supplied by other
companies. |
| what
changed in SSD year 2013? | | |
..
..
..
..
.. |
 | |
