we're #1 in enterprise SSDs - says Samsung congratulations -
enjoy it while you may
by
Zsolt Kerekes,
editor - StorageSearch.com
- August 11, 2016 |
Which SSD company is
the market share leader in enterprise SSDs? (Drives not
racks.)
Samsung has claimed
the #1 crown in a recent
story
which quotes various percentages (32% to 45%) from 3
market research companies
which relate to the first quarter of 2016.
Editor's comments:-
In part Samsung may be reaping some benefits from the frenemy trend in the
enterprise storage systems market.
This is the change in supplier
relationships when SSD drive companies begin to sell complete rackmount SSD
systems as part of their product portfolios. While Samsung remains a component
company and not a systems company (and the risk assessment of its SSD oem
customers suggests that Samsung isn't a threat to their own business) this is
a good enough reason for many array vendors to prefer Samsung as a drive
supplier.
Among other things in my
2015 big SSD
ideas roundup article I said this...
"Vendor strategies
which once appeared safe...(list) are no longer safe assumptions when your
biggest supplier can become your biggest competitor. Or when your biggest
customer can become your competitor."
In detail the frenemy
concept is more complex - because when you look at the range of
segmentation
in the SSD enterprise and the differences in
latency tiered products
and IPs needed to become a leader in each of those segments - an experienced
supplier risk assessment can be finely grained - as in "this company has
systems products for webscale and cloud - but my market is traditional mid range
enterprise - which requires more services and software - so therefore such a
supplier is not an immediate threat to my business."
Such
assessments have a short life in today's market however as everything will
change due to growing user sophistication and dissatisfaction - as I discussed
in my article -
90%
of the enterprise SSD companies which you know have no good reasons to survive.
But for now - and not withstanding the
unreliability
of inferring too much from SSD market data - and given the new trend for
intelligent
tiered memory systems to change the
disposition of
enterprise SSDs in server and storage systems - any company which has a leading
market share position in enterprise SSDs today has to be congratulated with
the warning that everything is still changing and the rate of
change is
speeding up.
PS - the ability of past SSD shipment data to predict
long term future success is something which I called into question over 9 years
ago when I started publishing the
Top SSD Companies series.
You
- dear readers - still have the ability to change markets, surprise us all and
remind us that the SSD architecture idea stands out as
1 of the 3 main
disruptive changes in the computer business in the past 40 years. | | |
