Back in October’2016, I posted this blog on storage – speculating that we are on the verge on the next big shift in storage – towards a distributed storage platform. Speculated that an emerging company will stand out from the plethora of startups in this space with a unique technology and business model.
18 months later, I would like revise that thesis. What remains true are the following
- Yes, the world of storage today follows distributed system design
- Yes, it will have a new business model
What I expected then was a startup company to emerge and exploit this category. I believe that will be less likely now as the market dynamics specifically the consumption model has changed.
What is in vogue today is the cloud like consumption model. Clearly there is AWS, Google and Azure in the cloud storage space and a good part of storage needs are addressed by them. Which also means they are eating a part of the storage pie (speculating upto 30% of the market in dollar value – perhaps higher in capacity). The notion of storage only software companies are less likely today than then (2016). As the consumption model increasingly looks like cloud like, private cloud is emerging as the new category. That means, storage (distributed) that is resilient, feature rich and bundled with other parts of the cloud stack. The three stacks that have a chance to gather market share in this space are VMC (VSAN), Nutanix (NDFS) and Azure (Blob storage).
As the enterprises (big and small) shift their infrastructure spend to public cloud and now evolving private cloud, there is little room left for traditional appliance like storage. While standalone solutions from Software Defined Storage (Ceph, MapR, Excelero, Datera, Driverscale to name a few) do have a play, the emergence of VMware cloud stacks (VMC), Nutanix and Azure stack says the market is accepting an integrated solution where good is ‘good enough’. i.e while these storage solutions from the top three private cloud players are architected well, they also meet the ‘good enough’ category leaving little room for any compelling alternatives.
So where do these ideas/companies go next? Cloud agnostic multi-cloud multi-data access solution that provides customers independence and avoid lock-in is an option. The challenge is competing against the investment of the big three is hard. Focus on emerging mode 2 applications and its needs – containers, KV stores, new data access methods. Potentially. Perhaps a variant of that, but focusing on the new and emerging memory stacks (memory centric). One has to combine a unique technology that satisfies a need along with unique business model, disruption will happen.
Again lets revist this in 2020 (18 months from now) and see how much of this speculation becomes reality.
----- Thinking Path ------- 