PEAK ARRAY: Cold fingers of Death stroke Big Biz disk boxes

IT depts are spending less on enterprise storage arrays, and instead considering shifting to the cloud – and away from arrays in their data centres. Or so we're told. These two changes were pointed out by Aaron Rakers, managing director of equity research outfit Stifel Nicolaus. He’s plotted the combined EMC, Hitachi, and IBM …

[Anonymous Coward]

"So ... enterprise storage array buyers are buying fewer traditional arrays because they are substituting hybrid and all-flash flash arrays for performance and cost-efficiency, and looking to the cloud and software-defined storage for simplicity and continued cost efficiency. Do you believe it?"

Not at all. I can't speak for any place but my own, however the reason we've flattened out is that the growth of a dollar's worth of enterprise storage's ability to deliver what we need from it has outstripped our growth. Per TB costs on the most recent box we put into production are significantly lower than the box it's replacing. Our data is growing, sure, but where enterprises were putting databases and mainframe on 146GB or 300GB disks 5 years ago, we're putting them on 900GB wide striped pools now and using tiering with SSD to provide hot-spot performance.

Most enterprises are slow to adopt new risky storage. All these startups are competing for the same dollars: enterprise science fairs, or SMBs run by a small team that reads more vendor slides than manuals.

[MityDK]

Um, yes I believe it because I see it every week.

These upstarts are moving into these traditional shops with small footprints and point solutions. Cloud storage is also taking some but not a lot yet, cloud computing is more compelling than storage because of bandwidth and security concerns.

But hybrid and all flash are absolutely going in with a very high acceptance rate into the big 3's territory, not for primary production or big scale out file, but as smaller deployments for VDI or Database, no question.