Storage snippets slither forth from San Fran analyst shindig

Western Digital is making more than five times as much money from flash than Seagate: $590m/quarter compared to $100m.

This came out at a Stifel Nicolaus Tech, Internet and Media conference held last week in San Francisco, where vendors gave presentations and answered questions.

Other highlights were:

• Seagate thinks there could be disk media tightness in 2015. Toshiba and Western Digital disagree.
• Show Denko has begun mass production of 8TB 3.5-inch disk drive platters; 1.1TB-1.3TB/platter. It expects media shipments to grow 3 per cent this year.
• Toshiba disk:
• • Has a 3-7 per cent HDD share in the high-capacity/cloud space.
  • Wants to increase its high capacity HDD business to 20-25 per cent market share from less than 10 per cent at the end of 2014.
  • Stifel MD Aaron Rakers says this could be difficult as Toshiba lacks the vertical integration enjoyed by Seagate/Western Digital and queries Toshiba's ability to fund such a manufacturing expansion.
  • Says it is the number 2 supplier of flash for SSDs.
• EMC
• • DSSD rack-scale flash products look like having a launch in the second half of this year.
  • Has reduced its engineering headcount related to its legacy VMAX and VNX platforms.
  • ScaleIO product is for highly-scalable hyper-converged environments (cloud/Cloud Service Provider) above and beyond VMware VSAN capabilities.
  • ScaleIO’s competitive advantage is that it can run on both bare metal and multiple hypervisors, support up to 100 per cent flash, and scale to thousands of nodes, i.e. it addresses a different market than VSAN.
• SanDisk expects HDD cannibalisation at all levels of the enterprise, including cold storage, by NAND flash.
• Western Digital
• • Says it has a 45 per cent share of the enterprise SAS SSD market.
  • Expects enterprise SSDs to grow at 25 per cent/year through to 2018, with some cannibalisation of performance enterprise HDDs.
  • Will develop the high-density flash array portfolio it acquired with Skyera.
  • Notebook SSD penetration has remained stable at 15 per cent for past year.
  • 8TB helium HDDs beginning initial shipments with 10TB later in 2015.
• Toshiba flash
• • Suggested notebook SSD penetration will reach 30 per cent in 2015, up from 24 per cent in 2014.
  • Estimates by 2018 NAND flash will account for 17 per cent of total (HDD + flash) capacity. Stifel thinks flash was around 11 per cent in 2014.
  • Toshiba and WD both expect hybrid HDDs will only have 5 per cent penetration this year.
• Quantum highlighted strong growth of its scale-out storage products (StorNext), with an expectation of 60-70 per cent growth in its fiscal 2015.
• Quantum highlighted an 80 per cent win rate in competitive engagements and new/ramping NetApp relationship.
• PernixData's (VMware in-hypervisor caching) roadmap show it becoming hypervisor-agnostic and adding more intelligence to its technology.
• Pure Storage
• • CEO Scott Dietzen said EMC is now leading with XtremIO instead of VMAX in competitive engagements.
  • Pure saw 250-300 per cent growth rates during the first three quarters of its January 2015 fiscal year.
  • It's adding synchronous replication capabilities to current asynchronous replication + snapshots.
  • It thinks raw flash can reach parity with 10K/15K rpm performance HDDs over the next 2-3 years.
• Solidfire saw 200 per cent year-on-year revenue growth in 2014.
• Tegile’s has seen 600 per cent revenue growth over the last 2 years.
• Tegile uses 2TB eMLC SSDs now and will offer 4TB SSDs in the March timeframe, possibly/probably HGST products.
• SuperMicro thinks it can grow to a $3 billion/year revenue in a couple of years.

Gosh, it's all so exciting. Can Seagate catch up with WD/HGST in flash? Will Toshiba grow its enterprise HDD share? Are we looking to see PernixData support Hyper-V? Is EMC looking to replace stabilising, even declining VMAX/VNX revenues with an XtremIO/DSSD/ScaleIO triple decker sandwich?

To find out the answer to these thrilling storage questions just keep reading the Register, dear readers. ®