28th quarterly edition - based on search metrics
in Q1 2014
by
Zsolt Kerekes,
editor - April 30, 2014
In the 7 years that it has been running - the Top SSD Companies -
researched and analysed by StorageSearch.com
- has established a unique reputation within the SSD industry for detecting
and predicting significant new business and technology transitions in the SSD
market.
The list is compiled by analyzing search behavior of a key
SSD focus group - the readers of StorageSearch.com
We've been
using filtered, focused online search - coupled with web analytics as a
market research tool for over 16 years.
People don't make significant
business decisions about companies and technologies they've never heard of.
That's why in fast changing markets - search (on leading trusted sites) is
often the first indicator of future changes.
But search by itself
isn't enough. You also need a narrative and a context to interpret what that
search activity might mean.
That's where
I come in.
I've been analyzing and reporting on the SSD market for over 20 years and have
had direct contact with many of the people who have made it and changed it.
I learn froim them - and we all learn from you. Because without the
participation of millions of thoughtful readers like you - the SSD market would
still be a fragmented niche technical market - without a strong identity -
much like it was in the first few decades of
SSD market
history.
Here, without further ado then - is the list of the
Top SSD Companies ranked by analyzing the search volume of hundreds of
thousands of SSD readers on StorageSearch.com
in the 1st quarter of 2014. |
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Top SSD Companies - ©
StorageSearch.com
based on SSD search volume in the 1st
Quarter 2014 |
Same as before.
This is Fusion-io's 21st straight quarter at
the top of this list - confirming it's still regarded as the most
important enterprise SSD company to watch when it comes to ideas and products.
I was asked by a colleague - why are there still so many
expectations about what this company can do in the enterprise market given
that Fusion-io's revenue effectively plateaued - compared to analyst
expectations of a few years ago?
And another question was this.
Everyone knows that Fusion-io is beset by strong competition in the market
which it created for PCIe SSDs - and yet instead of merely consolidating that
position the company seems poised to launch into another even riskier
market - that for rackmount SSDs. And that's a market in which there are
hundreds (rather than simply dozens) of competitors and where other
vendors (with longer track records) have recently taken a battering. How can
that make any business sense?
I said - the shape of the enterprise SSD
market in the next few years will be decided by factors like:-
- which companies can establish their SSD software platform as a
reference point or standard through which lens users view and compare all
other SSD vendors, and
- which companies can best understand the utilization efficiencies which
SSDs offer users at the integrated box system and cloud levels. From that
kind of understanding - vendors can leverage their technologies to make
tactical product improvements - but it also opens the gate to visualize and
create entirely new solution categories in the SSD-centric enterprise.
In
the first category - software - Fusion-io has got more invested and working
in the enterprise acceleration fabric than any other vendor.
In
the 2nd category - systems - Fusion-io really doesn't have a choice. That's
where its future will be decided and where it has to engage. If Fusion-io's
solutions can't be competitive at the rackmount systems level - then there's
less reason to buy its PCIe SSDs too. Because if there isn't a proprietary
rack-level efficiency kicker - designers might as well simply choose generic
PCIe SSDs.
The success or failure of these endeavors is closely watched
by the industry as a kind of advance bellwether of these new concepts. It
doesn't imply that all those readers are going to buy Fusion-io's products.
(Although many do.)
Up
9 places from previous quarter.
This is IBM's highest rank to date
- in the 7 years of publishing this series.
Indeed the 8% gap
between the #1 and #2 companies seen in this quarter was the smallest gap in
the past 7 years of measuring these rankings.
If these statistics
were reported monthly instead of quarterly - then IBM would have been the #1
company in January 2014, and the #2 company in February and March.
This
is a strong affirmation that the SSD market is interested in what it sees
IBM doing now in the enterprise.
That interest was weighted more
towards IBM's rackmount storage systems than in its server side SSD solutions
at the time of measuring this - although of course - that could change.
See
also:- -
It's IBM Jim -
but not as we know it
Down
1 place from previous quarter.
One of the interesting things which I
learned about LSI in this quarter was how long it has been quietly talking to
webscale SSD customers about their architecture and how they like to use SSDs.
This
was revealed in a 3 part blog series by Rob Ober,
Processor and System Architect LSI -
Restructuring
the datacenter ecosystem: Technologies, hyperscale and customers are changing
the industry.
I liked them all - but my favorite was
episode
#3 - in which Rob says:-
"The Chinese companies giants
are amazingly diverse, even within one datacenter, and arguments on
architectural direction are raging within these Internet giants – it's
healthy and exciting. However, the innovations that are coming are similar to
those developed by large U.S. Internet companies. Personally I have found these
Internet companies much more exciting and satisfying to work with than
traditional OEMs. The speed and cadence of advancement, the recognition of
problems and their importance, the focus on efficiency and optimization have
been much more exciting. And the youthful mentality and view to problems,
without being burdened by "the way we've always done this" has been
wonderful."
This is a telling example of what I call the
SSD heresies.
This ranking - which combines for the first time all the constituent
elements from the SSD companies
acquired by HGST
in 2013 - is the highest position in this series for HGST as a single
entity.
So - depending on your original comparison point - it can be
viewed either as an upward or downward movement quarter to quarter.
It
may be another few quarters before we can say for sure whether the sum effect
of those acquisitions is accretive in SSD brand and technology mind share -
although we assume that it should take less time to demonstrate that effect in
revenue.
Up 3 places from previous quarter.
This is OCZ's first listing in this
series as a Toshiba group company.
Unlike most other SSD acquisitions
- there was no pause in product announcements in the immediate post
acquisition period.
Instead it was like watching a big Go! switch
being pressed - to speed up the pace of activity in new product
launches.
Down
1 place from previous quarter.
Soon after the quarter ended we
learned that SAS SSDs were the main ingredients of SanDisk's enterprise
SSD revenue.
But it was too early to tell yet whether the
ULLtraDIMM product line (memory channel SSDs)
which came as part of the acquisition of
SMART in 2013 -
and which began shipments in IBM based servers in January 2014 - would be
the transformational product which would earn SanDisk a position at the top
table of the server-side SSD market.
SanDisk had previously
failed to make any market impact with its own design of PCIe SSDs.
Same as before.
30 days after this quarter ended
Skyera announced
volume shipments of its petabyte class skyHawk rackmount SSD - which had
previously been sampling at select customer sites.
So we'll have to
wait and see what reaction that has on the market.
Down 5 places from previous quarter.
Although this was Violin's lowest
position in these tables for for 3 years - I could name many other enterprise
companies which would be delighted to swap places and get this high up in the
top 10 part of the list.
These relatively worse than usual metrics
for Violin were earned in the period before the company's launch of its most
significant product in the past 6 years - the WFA - which was launched in April
2014.
We'll have to wait and see what impact that - and other changes at
the company - have made on the perceptions about Violin in the enterprise
market.
Up 1 place from previous quarter.
If curiosity
about why so much money has been invested in a single pre IPO SSD company
generates search volume then Pure Storage was doing more than enough to
attract its place in this list as - soon after the quarter had ended - the
company announced yet another $225 million in funding - bringing the total in
all rounds to nearly $0.5 billion.
Now I've not seen anything from
Pure Storage - which gives me any convincing technology explanation of why
investors are so confident in the unique merits of their bsuiness model.
(Which is basically that they run SSD array software services on a bunch of SAS
SSDs in a box.)
The answer more likely lies in their sales and
marketing - which presents a much slicker and more streamlined image than many
of the companies they compete with. And when 90% of vendors are using
similar raw drives and servers - then sales and marketing could be a material
difference (maybe for a while anyway). We'll have to see what it says in their
IPO filing documents.
Down
5 places from previous quarter.
Despite the corporate theory that
WhipTail has been absorbed into
Cisco and that's all you
really need to know (until they have done something clever with the software
and designed some new branded boxes to make them look better) - that's not
exactly the way that the SSD market has been looking at it.
Hence it
has been people trying to unfathom WhipTail's view of the enterprise SSD vision
- rather than the Cisco version of events - which retained for the company
an impressive listing in Q1 2014.
And during this time we learned in
some later blogs by Robin Harris
(StorageMojo (and others) that
people
were still buying Whiptail flash arrays.
Down 2 places from previous quarter.
Nimbus got a
positive marketing communications endorsement in this quarter from
the news
that its rackmount SSD family - the
Gemini All-Flash Array
- had been assessed to be the top scorer #1 - in the
DCIG
2014-15 Flash Memory Storage Array Buyer's Guide.
Although I have
reservations about the usefulness of this opinion based report for many
reasons - it's a PR triumph for the companies who got high rankings.
related
articles:-
First
appearance in these lists.
Back in November 2013 - after speaking to
Maxta's founder - Yoram Novick
- he told me that unlike most of the other SSD software companies which we had
been talking about - he believed Maxta was one of the 1 to 5 per cent of
storage software companies which are different and which offer sustainable
value.
Since then he and I have talked about some other enterprise
SSD stuff too - although I didn't write about it - because I was just
testing out some new concepts to see if they made sense from a software
perpective.
Anyway - it looks like enough of you agree with Yoram and
think there's something different about Maxta. - Enough to project it straight
into this list at such a high ranking.
I guess it's easier to see
what matters when you compare similar things - and Q1 2014 was an intense time
for new SSD software product launches.
It's in that context - that what
Maxta offers - becomes clearer.
Same as before.
Micron didn't say anything significant about the
SSD market in this quarter.
First
appearance in these lists.
In
February 2014
A3CUBE emerged from
stealth mode and launched a fast low latency shared memory system called
RONNIEE
Express which has sub microsecond replication and broadcast features and
which connects via the PCIe interface. RONNIEE Express can provide a PCIe fabric
for large scale enterprise and server deployments. A3CUBE says its architecture
is scalable to thousands of connected servers and storage racks.
A3CUBE
is one of the rare companies which has entered the
Top SSD Companies list
within a single quarter of exiting stealth mode or launching their first
product.
Other companies in this exalted category include:-
Fusion-io,
SandForce,
Skyera and
DensBits.
That's
an early indicator that there is already significant industry interest in
A3CUBE's concepts.
Same as before.
Re-entry into this list.
This quarter saw the
fruition of Diablo's years long collaboration with
IBM come to market - when
IBM announced it was using eXFlash DIMMs (SanDisk ULLtraDIMM SSDs)
in new high end servers.
Down
3 places.
Up 1 place.
Down 2 places.
Re-entry into this list.
In
March 2014 -
Samsung provided an
interesting comparison point between
2.5" SAS SSDs and
2.5" PCIe SSDs
- with its comment that the
SFF-8639
1.6TB NVMe PCIe SSDs which it was shipping to Dell were 3x
faster than 12Gbps SAS SSDs.
21 (tied) - EMC
Down 5 places.
EMC didn't do anything interesting on the SSD front in this quarter - but
made up for it afterwards in May 2014 - when
the company
announced it had acquired a stealth mode memory channel SSD in a box
company - DSSD.
For
a competitive analysis and technology perspective see
rackmount SSD news
Same as before.
Down 3 places.
In
January 2014 -
Virtium began
shipping the highest capacity SLC-based 10-pin eUSB module - the
TuffDrive
10-pin eUSB - which is a 32GB MIL-810 rugged module with
sustained R/W speeds upto 160MB/s and 125MB/s respectively.
Re-entry
into this list.
Down 1 place.
And what about all those other (575+) SSD companies not named
above?
The SSD market is now big enough to enable many SSD
ecosystem companies to have very viable businesses - even when they aren't 1
of the top 25 or so SSD companies.
If you work at a company which isn't
in the list yet - but would like to be - here's some simple advice.
- get better
- work harder
- remember to let people know when you have exited stealth mode
More
from me - as usual on the SSD
news page etc.
Note:- Rankings above are based on analyzing the search activity of
SSD readers on StorageSearch.com who came from over 165,000 different servers
which accessed our SSD content in the 3 months period ending March 31, 2014.
The rankings above are based on multiple types of search and
browsing activity - and after filtering out unreliable and fake searches
coming from robots and spam intended to subvert rankings for criminal or
malicious reasons. Our rankings and tie breakers also use data from some other
SSD related internet sources from time to time.
You can read more
about the significance and track record of this methodology in predicting and
observing SSD market intentions in
earlier editions of this
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