What an interesting storage market.
It’s hot to be cold again … first, flash changed the entire landscape for high performance storage for transactional system and VMs – now the other end of the storage spectrum is going through dramatic shifts. Most recently HGST announced a definitive agreement to acquire Amplidata – reference http://www.zdnet.com/article/wds-hgst-buys-amplidata/
As we all know data growth is a major headache for IT departments. The cost model for that storage must change and traditional storage approaches from vendors like EMC and NetApp will no longer cut it. That’s where new innovative storage systems like Cloudian HyperStore come into play. Using software defined storage technology, we use commodity servers and create a peer-to-peer scalable storage system which is ultra cost efficient. That’s how we achieve 1c per GB per month storage costs.
HGST’s acquisition of Amplidata is interesting as it puts them in direct competition with some of their drive OEMs – this has been a no-no in the industry for a long time. It appears that HGST is willing to take on that risk but I’d suspect they do it in a limited way.
My thoughts on what HGST will do :
- Will provide Amplidata in appliances for massive environments (eg their Active Archive appliance form factor)
- They will focus on only select Hyperscale customers – in a similar way to Hyve Solutions for Synnex
- Already Amplidata was focussing only on the Service Providers. HGST will continue this SP only focus.
- HGST has no direct customer channel – reinforces the targeting customer account focus
What does this say for the industry
- Hot technology – The technology fits a definite need and there’s interest
- One less player for us to deal with on selling to our accounts
- Our focus : we need to focus on a complete enterprise product and keep evolving – qos, multitenancy (including per bucket), hybrid, chargeback, comprehensive s3, are all features they do not have. We can stay ahead. In technology your iceberg is always melting – you just need to keep evolving, innovating and freeze out the competition.