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Where will storage go over the next 15 years? We rub our crystal ball

Follow the money – or, at least, our projections

Who else seems vulnerable?

HPE, having sloughed off printers and PCs, will find itself in the same place as it was before, and still need a galvanising growth strategy. The Machine isn’t ready for prime time. Memristors are a moving fantasy feast. You need, we think, to push Helion – and whoever thought up that name! – like crazy. That’s the future. Be a public cloud supplier or build a storm shelter, because you're reentering the public cloud tornado alley, and these whirling critters are going to suck up the data your storage stores and the apps your compute computes and your network gear transmits.

NetApp, the main stand-alone storage supplier, has its great FlexPod partnership with Cisco, and shares with Cisco a self-destructing implosion; of its ground-up design FlashRay all-flash array. Something will possibly emerge from the ashes. Generally it seems to us NetApp is staying in its comfort zone and appears to have gone into a period of innovation and quiet.

Look at this set of press releases from its Insight event in Las Vegas last week:

NetApp_Insight_releases

Press releases from NetApp around its Insight event.

Notice anything? There is an an almost complete lack of anything substantially new. We had a product performance guarantee for its all-flash AFF8000 and EF540 arrays, a few Data Fabric starter packs and that was generally it.

There are many intelligent people in NetApp, and their product people must be working on good stuff, you would think. Yet new CEO George Kurian, having steadied the ship after the unceremonious and troubling departure of the previous CEO, Tom Georgens, has yet, publicly, to set out any new direction for NetApp.

It’s as if the founders, like Dave Hitz and James Lau, are still doing the navigating. NetApp’s strategy seems to be to sell its way out of trouble with the existing CDOT/FAS, E-Series and EF-Series kit, StorageGRID and AltaVault.

Look around. IBM walked away from OEM’ing NetAp kit. Symantec is splitting, as is HP. Dell went private and is now buying EMC. All-flash, hybrid flash/disk, hyper-converged and software-only storage startups are taking myriad small chunks of your customer base away and growing. Storage is getting closer to servers and we fear your stand-alone, external storage array game is not sufficient to stem the flow of business away from Sunnyvale.

You surely can’t grow, NetApp, just by selling CDOT to your 7-mode customers.

Lenovo and Huawei, bankrolled by great home territory revenues in China and also telecommunications in Huawei’s case, are emerging threats. Lenovo will surely do more in storage now that its EMC reselling deal is threatened by Dell’s EMC acquisition. Come on NetApp. We can all see the jaws of a vice closing in on you. You’re a great, great company. Don’t just fade away by staying in your comfort zone.

Back at 20,000 feet

The EMC-Dell deal is a recognition of several things:

  • The glory days of on-premises legacy SAN and NAS arrays are over; going away, dying,
  • HW commoditisation is killing proprietary HW business,
  • Storage is embracing flash in a big way and getting closer to servers,
  • Customers want converged and hyper-converged stacks,
  • Scale-out is growing in importance,
  • The public cloud is unstoppable.

If our scenario is correct, the current on-premises storage business is facing a period of prolonged decline. Welcome to the first day of the rest of your life. ®

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