These same individuals stress that they are working with their suppliers to get this situation corrected and no one cited any specific supplier as the cause of the problem ( possibly because they want to stay on their good side.) However, the fact that I heard this as a contributing factor to the storage sales slowdown from multiple sources seems to suggest that until suppliers increase their flash production levels, it may negatively impact their enterprise storage sales and cause higher prices for end-users. As such, product sales that vendors expected to make in a specific quarter get pushed out due to the unavailability or late deliveries of flash components.
While not cited as a major contributor, individuals did share with me that some storage shipments have slipped due to tight supplies of flash. The primary factor working against lower all-flash arrays prices is a tight supply of flash. However, as these technologies get a foothold in organizations and take root, are they robbing storage vendors of future storage sales? My gut tells me yes but this is largely anecdotal evidence. Even now, storage vendors tell me that they rarely encounter vendors of these products in their sales process. One of the more difficult factors to measure is to what degree hyperconverged infrastructure and software-defined storage solutions are impacting traditional storage sales. Growth of hyperconverged infrastructure and software-defined storage technologies.Now HPE just needs to communicate those differentiators to the market place and adopt that technology across its other product lines.
Turns out, it was Nimble’s Infosight technology, its advanced integration with Docker, and its Cloud Volumes feature that piqued HPE’s interest in acquiring Nimble Storage. For instance, I was uncertain as to exactly why HPE was so interested in acquiring Nimble Storage when it already had multiple storage lines. Now try to explain how they differ and what advantages that one offers over the other. Keeping track of the large number of vendors coupled with the large number of all-flash array models can challenge even the most astute technologist. This number of all-flash array competitors is causing similar downward pricing pressure in all-flash arrays. The cloud storage market (Amazon S3, Google Drive, Microsoft Azure) are not the only ones experiencing the race to the bottom in the per GB pricing model. This much competition with so many product lines inevitably leads to price erosion. For example, HPE has all-flash arrays in its XP, 3PAR StoreServ, StoreVirtual, Nimble Storage and MSA product lines. Further, that list does not include the ones that were recently acquired ( Nimble Storage and Solidfire) nor does it fully take into account the multiple lines of all-flash arrays from the big technology players. Aside from the “ big” names in the technology space such as Dell EMC, HDS, HPE, IBM, and NetApp offering flash storage solutions, there are many others including Tegile, Kaminario, Pure Storage, iXsystems, StorTrends, Fujitsu, NEC, Nimbus Data, Tintri, and Nexsan, just to name a few. The number of companies selling enterprise flash storage products is staggering.
Here are some of the thoughts they had to share: I had a chance to stop by the HPE Discover 2017 event this past week in Las Vegas to catch up with many of the individuals in the industry that I know to get their “boots-on-the-ground” perspective on what they are hearing and seeing. The good news is that this retrenching should ultimately benefit end-users. The short answer: there does not appear to be a single reason for the pullback in storage revenue but rather a perfect storm of events that is contributing to this situation.
As storage revenues level off and even drop, many people with whom I spoke at this past week’s HPE Discover 2017 event shared their thoughts as to what is causing this situation. While the overall economy and even the broader technology sector largely boom, the enterprise storage space is feeling the pinch.