January 12, 2024 | Posted in News
Who are the top storage array manufacturers and what are their strategies towards cloud, container and consumption models of procurement?
In this article, we rank the top storage suppliers in terms of enterprise external storage according to IDC market share data for 2022 and give a brief summary of each player, where they are in the market, and where they are going Hybrid Cloud The world of storage gains traction and storage suppliers adapt to survive.
By clicking on the links in each section you can read a longer profile on the supplier published by Computer Weekly during the latter half of 2023. The market share data has been revised since those articles were published. Below are the figures for calendar year 2022 from IDC. IDC considers a difference of less than 1% to be a statistical tie.
The top spot among the seven large storage array manufacturers is Dell EMC, the infrastructure solutions group of Dell Technologies and the result of Dell’s $67 billion acquisition of Dell in 2016 – the largest in the history of the tech sector.
Dell EMC is the largest player among storage array manufacturers in terms of market share – 29.7%, up from 26.8% as measured by IDC in 2021.
Most of its products fall within the scope of EMC and cover SAN and NAS (PowerMax, PowerStore), NAS (PowerScale and Isilon), software-defined (Scalio) and object storage (ECS).
Dell EMC’s cloud strategy focuses on its Apex consumption model, which extends its cloud operating model to customers’ on-site storage and cloud locations.
Dell EMC’s container storage capability comes through an advanced Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver plug-in, called a Container Storage Module (CSM).
Like most of the suppliers in the top seven, Dell can go to customers with the full IT stack.
Apache ranks joint second in the 2022 IDC rankings with a market share of 9.9% (10.9% in 2021), and is not just a storage supplier but also a full stack provider.
The company has overhauled its storage offering, with the introduction of Elettra MP and its GreenLake as-a-Service portfolio as an enabling mechanism.
Elytra MP was launched in April, and is based on a scale-out architecture with nodes that can be controller-only or compute and storage, or even just storage capacity, and which can be accessed by file or Provision can be made to block.
Elettra MP is delivered through GreenLake, GreenLake, a consumption model that uses customer profiles to deploy, manage, and upgrade assets throughout their lifecycle.
Apache’s strategy is to be seen as an “edge-to-cloud company”, with GreenLake as a delivery mechanism on-premise and in the cloud, and CSI drivers in Electra MP for Kubernetes and all other major container orchestrations. Container storage capabilities through. Platform.
GreenLake offers storage and compute in the hybrid cloud, including a single console, OpsRamp, which came through an acquisition in 2023.
Huawei ranks joint second and is also a full stack IT hardware provider – spanning mobile handsets and 5G infrastructure – with a 9% market share (same as 2021).
Enterprise storage comes via OceanStor Dorado (NVME and flash), OceanStor Pacific (flash and HDD), and OceanStor (flash and HDD but not NVMe). All workloads fall into a range of profiles, such as performance, capacity, and streaming.
Huawei Cloud offerings span object, file, and block storage, as well as backup and disaster recovery services, but the company lacks a storage consumption purchasing model for on-premise hardware.
It appears that container storage is delivered from its Dorado storage array via CSI drivers.
Despite the company being hit by sanctions and sanctions by Western states, analysts suggest Huawei kit is significantly cheaper to buy and run than equipment from US-based competitors.
NetApp is one of two of the top seven that is effectively a pure-play storage supplier (along with Pure).
It ranked third with 8.3%, which is slightly lower than the 2021 IDC market share of 9.9%.
NetApp was synonymous with the NAS filer for the first decade or two of its existence. It now has a keen eye on a cloud-centric future with containerization and cloud operating models across on-premises and cloud locations.
The main storage array products are AFF, NVMe with flash and file and block access. The ASA range added in 2023 brought exclusive block access and TLC media. The AFF and ASA families may also offer quad-level cell (QLC) bulk flash storage options. NetApp’s E-Series tables still exist. Object storage comes through the StorageGrid.
NetApp’s storage array allows connectivity to major public clouds, while its storage is also available in Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). BlueXP, launched in 2022, is NetApp’s cloud operating model console for on-premise and cloud locations.
Container management in BlueXP comes through Astra features.
The consumption model of storage purchases comes through Keystone.
Pure Storage is one of two suppliers here that is more or less just a storage supplier, like NetApp. However, it is unique because it did not date back to 2000.
It debuted in 2009, and brings a certain amount of late-entrant advantage with its own drive technology, boasting much better flash density than rivals.
In terms of market share, it has moved up one place in 2021 with 6% compared to 4.1%.
Core to Pure’s flash storage products are its proprietary DirectFlash modules, which share flash management functionality with the array and thus can access capabilities unseen among competitors. Currently, it has 75TB capacity per module, with 300TB planned for 2026.
FlashArray is targeted at structured data, with variants available that address mission-critical workloads (//X and //XL), less performance-hungry use cases (/C) and capacity with QLC flash (//E). Let’s target. FlashBlade is Pure’s fast file and object storage family, providing instant access to large capacity storage through a Performance Line (//S) and QLC-equipped Capacity Line (//E).
Pure Storage is strongly oriented towards cloud operating models in hybrid cloud and cloud-native applications. These come to the public cloud via the Pure Cloud Block Store; Portworx focuses on cloud-native data management containerized applications; and Fusion, a cloud-like control layer that manages storage across on-site, cloud, and colo locations.
Pure Storage offers a purchase consumption model through its Evergreen Portfolio.
Hitachi Vantara had a 4.9% market share in 2021, but has fallen one place to 4.4% share in 2022.
The company is a full-stack IT provider, but also part of the giant Hitachi Group.
The flagship storage is the Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) 5000 series (NVMe and SAS flash), with mainframe as well as open system access (Fiber Channel, etc.).
Vantara’s E series lacks the mainframe accessibility of the VSP line. Hitachi Content Platform targets unstructured data with file and object access. Hitachi Unified Compute Platform is the company’s hyper-converged infrastructure.
Hitachi’s cloud offering includes the ability to extend datacenters from Hitachi VSPs to Equinix locations using the Hitachi Ops Center hybrid cloud data management tool.
Hitachi Kubernetes Service (HKS) allows customers to manage container storage across on-premises datacenters and three main public clouds. HKS uses CSI drivers to manage persistent volumes directly on Kubernetes nodes.
IDC figures put IBM Storage in the same ball park as Hitachi Vantara in terms of market share (4.7%) in 2021. IDC’s 2022 data shows the company falling out of the top six altogether.
Despite this, there is no doubt that IBM is a big IT player and a giant in the history of IT. But its recent history with storage has been one of declining revenue.
It has tried to compensate for this – with some success – with heavy bets on cloud, containerization and one-service delivery.
Its major array products are FlashSystem (NVMe, SSD and HDD), DS8K (with Fiber Channel and mainframe access), Storage Scale for parallel file system access (and object storage), Storage Fusion hyper-converged infrastructure, plus tape products. TS series.
Many IBM storage products are also available as software. IBM Spectrum Virtualize is a block storage virtualization system and enables multi-supplier connectivity and cloud tiering.
The IBM cloud strategy relies heavily on the use of containers and cloud-native applications in the cloud environment, with the use of Red Hat Secure and OpenShift as the platforms of choice. IBM also runs its own public cloud.
Containers can be managed through Red Hat OpenShift or IBM Cloud Kubernetes service.
IBM’s Storage as a Service operates across on-premise datacenters and the cloud, and is based on IBM FlashSystem and DS8K hardware.