Who will be David to EMC's external disk Goliath?
Unstoppable storage king and NetApp crush rivals
Posted in Management, 9th January 2012 09:01 GMT
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For seven years EMC and NetApp have increasingly dominated the external storage industry. Can they stay at the top?
Charts produced by Stifel Nicolaus analyst Aaron Rakers using his own and IDC numbers and company data show EMC and NetApp as growing at the expense of other mainstream suppliers, including Dell, HP, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM and Oracle/Sun.
The first chart shows revenues in external storage from all these vendors:
Quarterly revenue history for external storage from mainstream vendors.
The second combines EMC and NetApp numbers and compares these to the rest:
EMC/NetApp vs Dell/HDS/HP/IBM/Oracle-Sun in external storage revenues
See how the gap between EMC and NetApp on the one hand, and the rest on the other, has been widening more and more? It's evident that, although NetApp is still growing, it is not at the same pace. Its growth has slowed over the most recent quarters and it has not broken clear of the pack in the same way as EMC has. Both NetApp and EMC face challenges in continuing to grow and take business away from the others.
NetApp faces the conundrum of what to do about server flash: manage it – à la EMC Lightning – or bring data-bound servers apps into the FAS (or E-Series) arrays. Other issues include treating object storage as another FAS ONTAP extension or as a separate product line – like the E-Series. There is also the big data analytics issue which could be dealt with by partnering (Teradata) or buying in technology and establishing the E-Series as a strongly growing product line in the face of DataDirect and competition.
For EMC the big, big challenge is not a product one – all seems set fair on those multiple fronts – but rather a people issue. Big Joe goes later this year, becoming executive chairman. Does the company choose a finance/operations-focused successor like CFO David Goulden or a product engineering visionary like Pat Gelsinger? Whichever candidate is chosen to succeed Joe Tucci – be it one of these front-runners or a third contender – the EMC machine will crank out new products and grow revenues for a few quarters. But will it run out of steam as the new CEO lets EMC miss developing storage and information management trends?
How will EMC deal with the rise of DAS and converged server/storage/networking infrastructures demanding closer integration than VCE can provide? How will the relationship with Cisco develop? Will it follow the Dell model? Perhaps the archiving and content management software side of the EMC house needs a radical makeover, or needs to make an acquisition. Should EMC buy CommVault and have done with Documentum? There are lots of big questions here.
The key is the new CEO. EMC does not want to appoint its version of Leo Apotheker to the helm, although, as it happens, Leo is free at the moment ... ®
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COMMENTS
Defeat from the jaws of victory
It is such a shame that Sun (now Oracle) messed up their "open storage" line so badly.
They had all of the technology to build it (stable OS, fabulous features of ZFS, established hardware disk trays/servers), but the resulting management of the system it utter pants, so fragile that doing ANYTHING to it is likely to provoke an outage. In the (almost) 3 years we have had ours, the pathetic lack of progress in fixing basic problems is depressing.
We still hope that new comers will deliver something that suits our usage/cost point - lots & lots of big SATA disks, checksum-protected data, snapshots & CIFS/NFS working as one and without usurious license terms. Sun's system promised it all, but failed to deliver in all of the important details.
errrm, surely the David is NetApp?
Honestly, Posting an article about two storage leaders, and postulating about who will be the successor to the leader without thinking "hmmm, maybe it's the 2nd place guy?"
No, but I bet they would at least apologize for taking 10 days to replace a disk at a production data center (with very expensive production support costs).
But I can only imagine what Oracle has done to destroy Sun/STK. STK support was pretty fantastic. When Oracle purchased them they started calling immediately about renewing our support contract in a very threatening manner, and we got so turned off we just skipped it an looking to buying a quantum library. BTW, I have only had excellent support experiences with Quantum. I am sure they will get snatched up by EMC or Oracle and be ruined as well...
@But how long can it last
I can believe it, but then again, have you tried Oracle's support to gauge its suckyness?
But how long can it last
I am still baffled by the continued success of EMC. I don't think their products have any clear advantage over their competitors and their tech support is the worst in the business of the major storage firms (I have used them all, and I have yet to have a satisfactory, let alone good support experience with EMC).
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