The all-flash storage systems market is perhaps the most contested part of the overall storage systems market today, with at least ten notable vendors in the area. This makes creating differentiation difficult.
One company has emerged to challenge the market. Skyera, a San Jose, CA based company, with its Skyhawk all-flash storage systems has turned the market on its head. Unique to Skyera is that it owns the research, design, and engineering of every major component within the storage system – from the flash memory, to its flash controller, the storage system controller, and finally the storage services and management layer. In doing so, Skyera claims it has optimized all the interaction between components resulting in more attractive pricing and improved performance. It also uniquely leverages consumer MLC and integrates 40 ports of gigabit Ethernet.
Neuralytix believes that the all flash storage systems market is perhaps the most contested market in storage systems today. There are no less than ten notable vendors in this relatively small space. IBM’s decision to acquire Texas Memory Systems (TMS) is a further sign of both the activity and interest taken by all traditional systems vendors.
IBM continues to acquire technology to complement its existing portfolio. This announcement is further evidence of IBM’s understanding of the importance of the data and storage markets. It should also defuse the rhetoric about IBM’s commitment to strategically significant technologies.
Big Data is certainly the buzzword du jour; and Hadoop is the buzz of Big Data. However, despite the revolutionary value that it has created both for enterprises and society at-large, has long suffered from being not ready for most enterprises. After all, Hadoop was not developed with “typical” and traditional organizations in mind.
Symantec, in partnership with Hortonworks, has developed an add-on for Symantec’s Cluster File System (CFS). This no-cost add-on for existing Symantec CFS customers has removed many of the barriers and objections to using Big Data for “Big Business”.
At Neuralytix, we are strong believers that as it relates to Big Data, “if you’re not doing it, your competitors are!™“
There has been a lot of discussion over the use of solid state storage in the datacenter. Where should flash be integrated? At the server? At the storage? In the storage network?
Violin Memory has announced the integration of data management services into its all flash storage devices, resulting in a full featured storage system. This significantly increases the available market to Violin and places it in a strong competitive position against leading storage vendors.
The Neuralytix position on contemporary computing is that we make an assumption of convergence – compute, storage and network, working in harmony in one physical footprint. Most of the leading vendors have a solution that realizes this. For these vendors, converged infrastructures (CIs) have minimized differentiation, and commoditized the concept of the solution. While this may be a benefit to end-users in terms of cost efficiency and modularity, it has taken a toll on the value-added reseller (VAR). For many VARs, CI means lower margins.
One company, Scale Computing, has taken on this challenge, and have produced a solution that is differentiated in its design, cost efficient for the mid-market end-user, and enables VARs to add their touch of uniqueness, that translates directly to margin and profitability.
