Amazon, Azure and Google in race to the bottom ... of cloud storage pricing

A period of quiet, rest and reflection is what the storage industry needs after a frankly hectic and very eventful 2015. It won't get it. The opposing forces of simplicity and complexity, access speed versus capacity, server versus array, on premises versus cloud, and tuned hardware and software versus software-defined are …

[Lusty]

"The storage industry will see a shrinking number of startups this year as software-defined storage has run full tilt into the questioning buffers, being confronted with: "Yeah, you're SW-defined but what do you actually do that's new and needed?"

We may see containerisation-focused startups appearing, as that scene is so dynamic and energetic."

Oh the irony. Containerisation, just like SDS is great for the tiny niche that needs it.

[Adam 52]

"Containerisation, just like SDS is great for the tiny niche that needs it."

That niche includes backend developers who want a stable platform and automated deployment. So quite a big niche! Not that there aren't other technologies for the job, and have been ever since VMS.

[Lusty]

That is more than adequately served by existing technologies. As containerisation evolved to meet the requirements of real enterprise computing (security for example) it is growing to be as fat as virtualisation and harder to achieve. Yes, a developer can spin up a container in 4 seconds but no, we don't trust that repository he got it from. Neither do we accept that the libraries from Ubuntu will definitely be stable with a CentOS kernel just because the Dec thinks they are.

[Andy Taylor]

Is it sad that

I instantly recognised the track from Real Racing 3?

[Michael Habel]

Re: Is it sad that

I thought it looked a bit like Gran Turismo, or looking more closely at the Bonnet Forza for a second.

[KTF]

Re: Is it sad that

Brands Hatch after turn 1.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm struggling to the see the relevance of the 'and where's Violin Memory?' comment in the headline of this article? Is that a typo because Chris does seem a little obsessed about Violin!

[LarryF]

Too Many Storage Array Lines?

"Dell/EMC will lose some storage array lines and meet fresh problems on their way to the merging"

Michael: "Joe I think we have too many data storage lines, I just counted 16 of them."

Joe: "What? Sorry I can't hear you, the top is down on my Ferrari. I'll have to get back to you."

Dell Fluid File System

Dell MD Series

Dell NX NAS Appliance

Dell PowerVault

Dell (EqualLogic) PS Series

Dell (Compellent) SC Series

EMC Atmos

EMC Data Domain

EMC ECS

EMC Isilon

EMC Vblock

EMC VMAX

EMC VNXe

EMC VNX

EMC VNX-F

EMC XtremIO

[Anonymous Coward]

Kaminario

"Kaminario will see slowing growth rates and will likely not IPO or be acquired"

This sort of thing is often hinted at but never really explained. What is holding back Kaminario? Are they not just as well funded as SolidFire was? Did SolidFire not have warts and yet NetApp ponied up for them. Curious what the real scoop is on an AFA manufacturer well regarded by analysts and yet not receiving notoriety and presumably strong sales to go with the analyst's high opinion.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Kaminario

I think Chris has some aversion to Kaminario from his past apathy in writings. We are looking at them in US. We understand from our research that their sales are accelerating in US and they are well thought of. Lots of sales and engineering talent going over there now it seems. Gartner certainly likes them. NO marketing in past is definitely an issue. Architecture looks really solid with several differentiators. Scale out and up, dedupe by volume, dynamic block size writes and a few more I wrote down but will have to review. Looking forward to an evaluation. Pricing was much better than preliminary Pure and EMC quotes.

[gazthejourno]

Re: Re: Kaminario

Yep, he hates Kaminario: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/06/automated_comp_saas_for_kaminario_sales_reps/

I do enjoy it when PR employees think nobody from El Reg reads the comments and start astroturfing below the line. You're on my radar now, matey.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Kaminario

Still waiting on an El Reg exposé on Kaminario so we don't have to rely on Anonymous Cowards for their take.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why will HPE storage grow? It seems to be growing. What is the attraction?

[gnufrontier]

Digital gold ! An apt description. The storage people are selling pick axes and mules while the media trumpets the riches to be found. Yea. Right.

[Anonymous Coward]

Cloud Vendors = Huge Storage Margin

I love the the line "The race to the bottom in cloud storage pricing"....rubbish. Cloud vendors make huge margins on storage, maybe not the same obscene profit margins as EMC/Netapp/HDS/IBM/HP/etc yet highly profitable as the latest AWS quarterly results show.

AWS no longer drops prices aggressively as they used to (during their early growth phase) and why should they as they are now growing 70-80% year on year and as developers are using many proprietary services (think RDS/DynamoDB/SQS/SES/SWF/etc/etc) they can not easily migrate to another cloud as they would have to rewrite their applications, meaning their customers are locked in. Microsoft is doing similiar, Google is only big cloud vendor committed to Moore's law pricing, yet even Google is expensive compared to storage that I can build in a Tier-1 data centre based on commodity hardware and open source.