Western Digital continues buying spree by snapping up Tegile After dropping $1.4bn to try to buy Toshiba’s stake in the WDC-Toshiba flash foundry joint-venture, WDC has just bought the Tegile storage array business. Oh, and it bought the Upthere cloud consumer storage business for a guesstimated $100m-plus yesterday as well. Tegile sells IntelliFlash-branded hybrid flash/disk and all- …
I question whether Tintri, Kaminario, and Infinidat count as "mainstream." AFAIK, they're still wobbling along in the second tier, in the sense that they are not really household names in the storage world. I'm on the fence about Pure: they certainly have name recognition, but it's not clear whether they can actually make a profit. As for HPE . . . they have name recognition, but does anyone actually run physical HPE arrays?
Nimble sold quite well until recently. Not trying to imply they need longer sell well, I have no insight how they are doing since the acquisition. I have noticed that all the Nimble sales guys have jumped ship since then and many seem to have found a home at Cohesity and Rubrik.
Well, HPE bought 3Par quite some time ago and much more recently Nimble. They had their own branded stuff that was partly provided by Hitachi (the XP product line) and apparently either re-sold or bought Left-hand at some point in the past as well.
I'd call them a mainstream player, at least.
Some is concerned about whether they paid $900M or more.... they and SanDisk (guess what, now WD too) were/are major investors. the money just comes back home. The cash outflow is not that much (may be just stocks, who knows) and they just snapped up a very good company and products
HPE were #2 in external storage before they bought Nimble so a lot of people buy their physical arrays. I know a few Nimble people have moved to start-ups as they didn't fancy being HPE but the majority of their sales folk are now HPE. I expect a few more will drift away over time but HPE would seem firmly entrenched in that #2 slot. For all the talk of hyperconvered and cloud I suspect HPE storage will still be #2 and a >$1bn pa business in five years time.
This post has been deleted by its author
I'd hardly consider Kaminario, Tintri and Infinidat as mainstream players.
With respect, none have sufficient customers, broad sales reach and comprehensive product ranges, solution sets and compatibility lists built out. They are still running on investor money to fuel their growth stage.
Pure is transitional between niche and mainstream, but have yet to prove they can enter profitability ramp commensurate with a sales ramp.
Mainstream players are definitely:
Dell EMC
NetApp
HPE
HDS
IBM still squeaks in, but is slowly exiting the business: only IBM customers buy IBM storage these days, largely upgrades, refreshes or bundled with a mainframe or P-series.
I can tell you some of the financial details... I was an ex-employee who put my own money into Tegile stock to help the company succeed. They were purchased by Western Digital and I was sent a letter that explained there was no money to pay the stockholders anything at all, and they would not be getting any stock or compensation for the money. Basically they stole everyones money, while they still exist. Seems like white collar crime to me.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
