Posts by XtremJosh

IDC rolls out all-flash crystal ball again and it's all gone a bit weird

Both IDC and Gartner count product revenue only in their market share data.

NetApp ain't all that: Flashy figures show HPE left 'em for dust

Apples-to-Oranges comparisons

Chris,

Gartner's methodology counts product-only revenue for the calendar quarter. The chart you published is a mix of product-only and all-in (including support) revenue, and covers the fiscal quarter of some vendors. This is overstating the position of companies like Pure Storage and Violin Memory. This is easily verifiable by looking at their public financial statements.

For example, Pure Storage did $127.3M in fiscal Q4. That's much less than the $150M reported in the Gartner/Stifel table in your article. You can see this information on page 4 here: http://investor.purestorage.com/~/media/Files/P/Pure-Storage-IPO/reports-and-presentations/q4-2016-earnings/q4-fy-16-earnings-presentation.pdf

Furthermore, Pure's fiscal quarter is November/December/January. So you'd also have to adjust the numbers to remove January 2016 and replace it with November 2015.

I point this out because it will change the market share order of some of the vendors.

A tiny Violin plays as EMC tops all-flash array revenue chart

Aaron got Pure's numbers wrong

Gartner's method of determining market share data includes product revenue only. The numbers included for Pure are product + service revenue. The actual numbers that should have been included are lower and only would have extended XtremIO's lead.

Furthermore, you must adjust for Pure's fiscal year. For example Pure's Q4 is November/December/January, which means that for market share purposes you'd actually have to estimate their numbers lower to replace January with September (and so on for each quarter).

From Pure's own earnings presentations, their product revenue was (for their fiscal quarters):

Q1'15 (calendar year 2014): $22.1M

Q2'15 (calendar year 2014): $31.1M

Q3'15 (calendar year 2014): $43.8M

Q4'15 (calendar year 2014): $57.8M

Q1'16 (calendar year 2015): $63.6M

Q2'16 (calendar year 2015): $71.2M

Q3'16 (calendar year 2015): $113.6M

Q4'16 (calendar year 2015): $127.3M

Chris - would love to see you adjust your charts accordingly.

Pure Storage's latest arrays cost DOUBLE what it claimed earlier

Re: Thinking outloud $/GB coupled with Pooled vs. Persistent VDI Desktops

FULL DISCLOSURE: I work for EMC XtremIO. Please visit "http://xtremio.com/white-papers-data-sheets" where we have posted a few large scale VDI reference architectures with XtremIO. As to your question about needing 200K IOPS and VDI being write heavy. Yes, VDI can indeed be write heavy, especially if you are using Citrix PVS which does lots of read caching in the PVS servers. But other times it is read heavy - for example during boot or logon storms. This is all covered in the reference architectures.

About IOPS - it really comes down to what you're trying to deliver. At XtremIO we fully believe that for VDI projects to be successful you need to deliver a "better than desktop" user experience. This means a virtual desktop that performs better than a modern SSD-equipped ultrabook like a MacBook Air. Users don't like getting a virtual desktop that mimics the behavior of a cheap desktop with a SATA drive in it. The great thing is that inline deduplication technology on XtremIO makes it not only feasible to deliver this level of performance, but to do it at a $/desktop that is very attractive - whether you plan to deploy linked clones or full clone persistent desktops.

These capabilities were not possible few years ago. Do your flash array homework wisely as not all flash arrays can deliver the requisite performance or economics - particularly for full clone desktops.