* Posts by StorageInsider

6 publicly visible posts • joined 11 May 2016

HPE and Pure Storage all-flash array market shares decline

StorageInsider

Re: Dell's 1Q performance based on a re-swizziling of fiscal calendar

That's a fair question. Sellers are typically motivated to drive hard in the last month of their year to meet quotas. The last month of the most recent year was January 2018 (one year after the change you accurately mentioned).

IDC's most recent report covers the calendar year for all vendors for Jan-March 2018. (It takes them a little over two months to assemble that data and report on 1Q18. The large change is compared to EMC's 1Q17 calendar performance, which was the first quarter of their 2017 fiscal calendar, meaning the lightest quarter of the year for most sellers.

So compare really heavy month activity to really light months and you get a large delta swing.

Hope that helps.

StorageInsider

Dell's 1Q performance based on a re-swizziling of fiscal calendar

Dell is still behind from where they were a year ago if you look at a full four quarters of storage revenues.

Dell/EMC's 1Q calendar year performance is largely explained by a one time adjustment of fiscal calendar year from January to December, previously to the new calendar cycle of February to end of January.

For this one time cycle, Dell benefited by comparing their seasonably lowest 3 months of the year in 2017, to their single seasonably highest end of year month, plus the first two months of next fiscal year, in calendar 1Q18.

This means a very easy compare, and not important to obsess over. Even the Dell execs said their performance going forward would be 'lumpy' (at least four times in the earnings transcript). It also means that for this one period, Dell appears to have gained share vs. competitors (but it came at the expense of Dell's negative fourth quarter last year.

So watch and wait until next quarter to see where this really goes.

I'm sure many of you will not be impressed.

Array with you: Hitachi's Vantara begins rip-and-replace rampage

StorageInsider

Re: 100% guarantee

"Hey, if you want me to take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed, I will. I got spare time. But for now, for your customer's sake, ya might wanna think about buying a quality product from me."

- Movie quote from Tommy Boy

Big Blue plumps up storage line with filer and fabrics

StorageInsider

Isn't improving on something usually viewed as a positive?

IBM's Realtime Compression has been heralded as among the better implementations for a very long time, considering that other vendors often do compression as a background task requiring more reads and writes. The new implementation improves on this even more by:

- returning the space back to the system,

- adding inter-system compressed data movement (don't have to rehydrate when moving data, and then recompress) improving performance of that data movement

- returning the dedicated compression CPU and memory back to main SVC code AND

- eliminating licensing charges for the legacy compression.

So, uhmm...Bigger, Faster, Cheaper

...dropping the mic!

( I am an IBM'er)

You've got petabytes of unused storage, says Formation. Er, do we?

StorageInsider

Sounds like a fine method for doing non-essential workloads that can be 'kicked out' when the primary workload needs it back. They got $27M in funding, which is pretty impressive, so they probably convinced somebody there's a market for it. Threats to the model? Customers increasingly using their storage efficiently. But hey, look in your closets, folks, I'll bet you'll find a lot of wasted space.

EMC says Pure Storage dedupe is both in-line and post-process

StorageInsider

https://www.purestorage.com/products/purity/flash-reduce.html

C'mon guys, this is no secret, it's an advertised feature, right on the website that Pure does both inline and what they call 'deep reduction' or post process reduction