5 years in storage: Flash mutants, big data and (WTF is) the cloud

Over the last five years, there have certainly been a few structural changes: the wannabes and the could've-beens have mostly disappeared through acquisition or general collapse. But the big players are still the big players: EMC, HDS, HP, IBM and NetApp still pretty much dominate the industry. And the big firms core products …

[Steve Knox]

Dedupe

...there is no way way to use what has been sold effectively.

{didn't see a corrections link; apologies if I missed it}

[Bruce Hockin]

What about the impact of software defined storage?

Hi Martin,

Always eager to read your blogs and, either by hope or design, they really are a reflection of what I am seeing in the market. I have a diagram, which I discuss with my partners, which pretty much summarises all the external influencing factors you ahve mentioned such as big data, but also includes mobility as I believe this will also help define reuqirements of future storage architectures.

Interestingly, smack in the middle of my graphic, sandwiched between high performance flash/hybrid and scale-out file/ojbect storage is software defined storage. Now technically, SDS is really an overlay play as one could argue that any vendor who deloys their storage on supermicro servers is infact an SDS player (or at least has the potential to be) beit T0 flash, T1 SAN/NAS arrays or T2/Archive scale-out oject stores. So, I was curious, why no mention of SDS in your blog? Is it too immature to have an impact in the foreseeable? are there not enough vendors visible to make it a relevant conversation right now? Would appreciate your thoughts.

Cheers

Bruce