March 7, 2011 – Despite impressive growth from some its arch rivals (most notably, NetApp) EMC appears to be widening the gap between itself and its collective competitors, according to a report on the disk systems market by IDC. The market research company recently issued statistics for the fourth quarter and full-year 2010, including market size, vendor shares and revenues.
EMC capped 2010 with a 25.6% market share on revenue of $5.44 billion in the external disk systems market. That compares to a 2009 market share of 22.9% on revenue of $4.1 billion.
Rounding out the top 5 in 2010 were IBM (13.8% share, down slightly from a 14.3% slice the previous year), NetApp and HP (tied with 11.1% market shares) and Dell (9.1% share on 2010 revenue of almost $2 billion).
EMC posted impressive 2009—2010 revenue growth of 32.5%, but that was overshadowed by NetApp’s whopping 49.5% revenue growth. NetApp raked in $2.35 billion in 2010, vs. $1.57 billion in 2009.
Going forward, it will be interesting to see how HP’s acquisition of 3PAR, EMC's acquisition of Isilon, and Dell’s acquisition of Compellent will alter the market share dynamics and revenues.
Conspicuously absent from the top 5 in 2010 was Hitachi Data Systems. However, HDS did claw its way into the top 5 in the fourth quarter of 2010, ending the quarter in a virtual tie with Dell for the last spot. HDS garnered an 8.7% share in 4Q10 on revenue of $533 million vs. Dell’s 7.9% share on revenue of $483 million.
In the fourth quarter, EMC pulled in $1.58 billion for a 26% market share. That compares to a share of 23.9% in 4Q 2009 ($1.25 billion in revenue).
However, NetApp’s surge was again apparent in the fourth quarter of 2010. The company posted year-over-year revenue growth of 43.7% (vs. 26.3% for EMC), and closed the gap with HP on revenue of $630 million vs. HP’s $704 million.
Last year was a good one for the external disk systems market, which grew by 18.3% to top $21 billion.
Breaking down 4Q10 by market segments: the NAS market grew 41.3% year over year. EMC was #1 in NAS, followed by NetApp at 23.7%.
The iSCSI market posted equally impressive gains, growing 42.1% in 4Q10 vs. 4Q09. Dell was #1 in the iSCSI space with a 32.6% share, followed by HP (14.7%) and EMC (13.4%).
One more fun fact: EMC has been #1 in the external disk systems market for 14 consecutive years.
For more details, see IDC’s press release: “Worldwide Disk Storage Systems Finishes 2010 with Double-Digit Growth on Strong Fourth Quarter Results.”
Showing posts with label EMC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label EMC. Show all posts
Monday, March 7, 2011
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Cloud storage: Nirvanix takes shots at Amazon S3, EMC Atmos
February 24, 2011 – IDC predicts that by 2014 the cloud storage market will exceed $7 billion per year. That compares to about $1.5 billion in 2009. Assuming IDC’s prediction comes true (which is debatable), it’s no wonder that so many vendors are crowding into the cloud storage space.
But every small cloud storage equipment/services provider has to come up with a business case that sets them apart from the 800-pound gorillas in the market, most notably Amazon and EMC.
All of the smaller players have value propositions versus the big boys, but Nirvanix has recently become one of the more vocal challengers. To back up their claims, Nirvanix officials cite customers such as NBC Universal and GE, both of which deployed Nirvanix’s cloud storage platform after evaluating Amazon S3, EMC Atmos and other alternatives.
I recently chatted with Geoff Tudor, vice president for strategy and business development at Nirvanix, and Steve Zivanic, Nirvanix’s new vice president of marketing.
Versus Amazon’s S3, Nirvanix claims a number of advantages. For example, unlike Amazon, Nirvanix allows customers -- including security auditors -- to inspect its data centers (of which there are seven worldwide). That might not be a big deal for many companies, but for those that still harbor concerns about certain aspects of the cloud – such as security – it might be important.
Nirvanix also allows customers to determine where their data will reside, and to provision their data, and guarantees Quality of Service (QoS) levels. And Nirvanix enables federation of public (remote) and private (local) clouds.
Versus EMC Atmos, Nirvanix claims scalability advantages (billions vs. millions of files), the ability to federate public and private clouds (vs. only private clouds), and independence from specific hardware and file systems. Nirvanix’s Web Services Layer can sit on top of virtually any file system, including those from NetApp, EMC (Isilon and Celerra) Exanet and Ibrix. In addition, Nirvanix users only pay for usable capacity (aka storage-as-a-service); there are no extra charges for data protection capacity (e.g., replication, RAID 6).
Nirvanix also differentiates its approach to cloud storage by offering different deployment options, which the company collectively refers to as “CloudComplete.” At the heart of each deployment option is the CloudNAS gateway.
From there, users can leverage Nirvanix’s Storage Delivery Network (SDN) public cloud platform, which provides a federated, tiered grid with a single namespace and unified view, or go with the company’s hNode software, which provides a cloud services layer for hybrid (public and/or private) cloud architectures.
More cloud storage articles:
Is cloud-enabled DR ready for prime time?
EMC debuts self-service platform for cloud storage
eSilo tackles cloud-based backup, DR
3X upgrades cloud storage appliances
But every small cloud storage equipment/services provider has to come up with a business case that sets them apart from the 800-pound gorillas in the market, most notably Amazon and EMC.
All of the smaller players have value propositions versus the big boys, but Nirvanix has recently become one of the more vocal challengers. To back up their claims, Nirvanix officials cite customers such as NBC Universal and GE, both of which deployed Nirvanix’s cloud storage platform after evaluating Amazon S3, EMC Atmos and other alternatives.
I recently chatted with Geoff Tudor, vice president for strategy and business development at Nirvanix, and Steve Zivanic, Nirvanix’s new vice president of marketing.
Versus Amazon’s S3, Nirvanix claims a number of advantages. For example, unlike Amazon, Nirvanix allows customers -- including security auditors -- to inspect its data centers (of which there are seven worldwide). That might not be a big deal for many companies, but for those that still harbor concerns about certain aspects of the cloud – such as security – it might be important.
Nirvanix also allows customers to determine where their data will reside, and to provision their data, and guarantees Quality of Service (QoS) levels. And Nirvanix enables federation of public (remote) and private (local) clouds.
Versus EMC Atmos, Nirvanix claims scalability advantages (billions vs. millions of files), the ability to federate public and private clouds (vs. only private clouds), and independence from specific hardware and file systems. Nirvanix’s Web Services Layer can sit on top of virtually any file system, including those from NetApp, EMC (Isilon and Celerra) Exanet and Ibrix. In addition, Nirvanix users only pay for usable capacity (aka storage-as-a-service); there are no extra charges for data protection capacity (e.g., replication, RAID 6).
Nirvanix also differentiates its approach to cloud storage by offering different deployment options, which the company collectively refers to as “CloudComplete.” At the heart of each deployment option is the CloudNAS gateway.
From there, users can leverage Nirvanix’s Storage Delivery Network (SDN) public cloud platform, which provides a federated, tiered grid with a single namespace and unified view, or go with the company’s hNode software, which provides a cloud services layer for hybrid (public and/or private) cloud architectures.
More cloud storage articles:
Is cloud-enabled DR ready for prime time?
EMC debuts self-service platform for cloud storage
eSilo tackles cloud-based backup, DR
3X upgrades cloud storage appliances
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
EMC sets revenue records, again
January 25, 2011 – I couldn’t find an iota of bad news in EMC’s Q4 and year-end financial report today, so I turned to the financial analyst community. They couldn’t find anything negative either, although a few of them noted that, going forward, EMC may face more hurdles than it’s used to facing.
While generally praising EMC’s report, Technology Business Research (TBR) analyst Greg Richardson noted that “TBR expects EMC to face headwinds from multiple forces as it attempts to expand in the midmarket. Although the company posted 22% year-to-year growth in mid-tier revenue in 4Q10, we believe EMC will be forced to adjust its services model in order to win in the channel against NetApp, which leaves whitespace for channel partners to utilize their own services when deploying and supporting NetApp products.”
Richardson also noted that “Additionally, EMC will face a hurdle in the form of public cloud adoption. As customers become increasingly more comfortable and trusting of the cloud’s security, TBR expects adoption of public cloud to increase, particularly in the price-sensitive low end of the midmarket.”
And Stifel Nicolaus analyst Aaron Rakers noted that, going forward, EMC could face increasing competition at the high end (Symmetrix) of the market, particularly from Hitachi (Virtual Storage Platform), IBM (refreshed DS8000) and from 3PAR now that HP owns that company.
Other than those potential future challenges, everything’s coming up roses for EMC.
The company set records across the board in Q410 and for the full year. Fourth quarter revenue was $4.9 billion, up 19% over Q409. GAAP net income increased 61% year-over-year to $628.6 million. GAAP diluted earnings per share were up 53%. EMC closed the quarter with $9.5 billion in cash and investments.
For the full year (2010), EMC’s revenue was $17 billion, an increase of 21% over 2009 revenue. GAAP net income increased a whopping 75% to $1.9 billion, and diluted earnings per share were up 66%.
EMC executives expect 2011 revenue to be in the $19.6 billion range.
Diving a little deeper into EMC’s fourth quarter numbers: Symmetrix revenue increased 19% vs. Q4 2009, and revenue from the company’s mid-tier lineup (Clariion, Celerra, Centera, Data Domain, etc.) was up 23%. Revenue from majority-owned VMware was up 38%.
Looking ahead, I’m sure EMC will get a nice boost when the Isilon product line ramps, and I also expect very positive results from the recently introduced VNX/VNXe unified storage product line. And with the large amount of cash on hand, expect EMC to make some more acquisitions this year, most likely in the cloud and virtualization spaces.
Related article:
EMC announces 41 new products
While generally praising EMC’s report, Technology Business Research (TBR) analyst Greg Richardson noted that “TBR expects EMC to face headwinds from multiple forces as it attempts to expand in the midmarket. Although the company posted 22% year-to-year growth in mid-tier revenue in 4Q10, we believe EMC will be forced to adjust its services model in order to win in the channel against NetApp, which leaves whitespace for channel partners to utilize their own services when deploying and supporting NetApp products.”
Richardson also noted that “Additionally, EMC will face a hurdle in the form of public cloud adoption. As customers become increasingly more comfortable and trusting of the cloud’s security, TBR expects adoption of public cloud to increase, particularly in the price-sensitive low end of the midmarket.”
And Stifel Nicolaus analyst Aaron Rakers noted that, going forward, EMC could face increasing competition at the high end (Symmetrix) of the market, particularly from Hitachi (Virtual Storage Platform), IBM (refreshed DS8000) and from 3PAR now that HP owns that company.
Other than those potential future challenges, everything’s coming up roses for EMC.
The company set records across the board in Q410 and for the full year. Fourth quarter revenue was $4.9 billion, up 19% over Q409. GAAP net income increased 61% year-over-year to $628.6 million. GAAP diluted earnings per share were up 53%. EMC closed the quarter with $9.5 billion in cash and investments.
For the full year (2010), EMC’s revenue was $17 billion, an increase of 21% over 2009 revenue. GAAP net income increased a whopping 75% to $1.9 billion, and diluted earnings per share were up 66%.
EMC executives expect 2011 revenue to be in the $19.6 billion range.
Diving a little deeper into EMC’s fourth quarter numbers: Symmetrix revenue increased 19% vs. Q4 2009, and revenue from the company’s mid-tier lineup (Clariion, Celerra, Centera, Data Domain, etc.) was up 23%. Revenue from majority-owned VMware was up 38%.
Looking ahead, I’m sure EMC will get a nice boost when the Isilon product line ramps, and I also expect very positive results from the recently introduced VNX/VNXe unified storage product line. And with the large amount of cash on hand, expect EMC to make some more acquisitions this year, most likely in the cloud and virtualization spaces.
Related article:
EMC announces 41 new products
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
EMC + Dell: It’s not Ozzie and Harriet anymore
January 19, 2011 -- It’s not news that the fissure is getting deeper, and wider, in the once rock-solid reseller relationship between EMC and Dell. And the fissure started looking more like a crevasse this week as the relationship became icy when EMC introduced the VNX and VNXe (entry level) line of unified storage systems as part of a massive rollout of new products (see “EMC announces 41 new products” ).
EMC chairman, CEO and president Joe Tucci made a number of interesting remarks this week, but I think the most strident was in a CRN article where he was quoted as saying: “In this product line [the VNXe] there is no Dell partnership. In any conversations we have had with Dell, Dell will not take up this partnership. They will not resell this product.” (See Joe Kovar’s article on CRN: “EMC’s Tucci: No Dell Partnership With VNX/VNXe.”)
Tucci went on to say: “Obviously some channel partners – maybe all channel partners – would see Dell as a competitor. Here we are saying ‘Don’t worry about it – Dell is not getting this product.’ It sounds like I’m saying ‘You can’t have it, Dell’ [but] basically, it doesn’t fit their strategy. It doesn’t fit our strategy.”
But it’s important to note that those comments related to the low-end VNXe (which has a starting price of less than $10,000), not the VNX line.
Here’s what Dell has to say, courtesy Dell spokesperson David Graves: “Dell is selling VNX through our reseller agreement. A Dell-branded OEM version of VNX is still in discussion. Dell and EMC have mutually agreed not to use Dell as a channel for the VNXe product – either as a reseller or a Dell-branded OEM offering.”
So Dell will not resell the VNXe but will – at least for now – resell the VNX as an EMC-branded product with the (unlikely) possibility of reselling it with the Dell-EMC brand.
A little (probably unnecessary for InfoStor readers) history: The EMC-Dell relationship began 10 years ago and was for some time a wildly successful win-win. The fissure in the relationship probably started to appear when Dell acquired EqualLogic, which put Dell on the storage map. (In its last reporting period, Dell stated that revenue from the EqualLogic line grew 66% over the previous year.)
The fissure widened when Dell made a bid for 3PAR (eventually losing a bidding war with HP) and started looking like a chasm when Dell said it would acquire Compellent, which is still in progress.
The decision (by EMC or Dell or both?) for Dell to not resell the VNXe is a real boon to EMC’s resellers, which otherwise would have had to compete with Dell. But the two companies should do the entire channel a favor and just sever the relationship and move on.
Related articles:
EMC announces 41 new products (InfoStor)
EMC’s Tucci: No Dell Partnership With VNX/VNXe (CRN)
EMC chairman, CEO and president Joe Tucci made a number of interesting remarks this week, but I think the most strident was in a CRN article where he was quoted as saying: “In this product line [the VNXe] there is no Dell partnership. In any conversations we have had with Dell, Dell will not take up this partnership. They will not resell this product.” (See Joe Kovar’s article on CRN: “EMC’s Tucci: No Dell Partnership With VNX/VNXe.”)
Tucci went on to say: “Obviously some channel partners – maybe all channel partners – would see Dell as a competitor. Here we are saying ‘Don’t worry about it – Dell is not getting this product.’ It sounds like I’m saying ‘You can’t have it, Dell’ [but] basically, it doesn’t fit their strategy. It doesn’t fit our strategy.”
But it’s important to note that those comments related to the low-end VNXe (which has a starting price of less than $10,000), not the VNX line.
Here’s what Dell has to say, courtesy Dell spokesperson David Graves: “Dell is selling VNX through our reseller agreement. A Dell-branded OEM version of VNX is still in discussion. Dell and EMC have mutually agreed not to use Dell as a channel for the VNXe product – either as a reseller or a Dell-branded OEM offering.”
So Dell will not resell the VNXe but will – at least for now – resell the VNX as an EMC-branded product with the (unlikely) possibility of reselling it with the Dell-EMC brand.
A little (probably unnecessary for InfoStor readers) history: The EMC-Dell relationship began 10 years ago and was for some time a wildly successful win-win. The fissure in the relationship probably started to appear when Dell acquired EqualLogic, which put Dell on the storage map. (In its last reporting period, Dell stated that revenue from the EqualLogic line grew 66% over the previous year.)
The fissure widened when Dell made a bid for 3PAR (eventually losing a bidding war with HP) and started looking like a chasm when Dell said it would acquire Compellent, which is still in progress.
The decision (by EMC or Dell or both?) for Dell to not resell the VNXe is a real boon to EMC’s resellers, which otherwise would have had to compete with Dell. But the two companies should do the entire channel a favor and just sever the relationship and move on.
Related articles:
EMC announces 41 new products (InfoStor)
EMC’s Tucci: No Dell Partnership With VNX/VNXe (CRN)
Sunday, January 2, 2011
The Top Ten Storage Acquisitions of 2010
January 3, 2011 -- I originally posted a Top Ten acquisitions list in September, under the assumption that after the blockbuster HP-3PAR buyout we may have seen the last of the big storage acquisitions for the year. Wrong. The storage industry capped a crazy year of M&A fever with the EMC-Isilon and Dell-Compellent acquisitions. With those additions, I had to knock off from the list a few of the relatively minor acquisitions of the year, including SolarWinds’ acquisition of Tek-Tools and Exar’s buyout of Neterion.
Here's my revised list of the Top 10 storage acquisitions of 2010, in ascending order:
#10: PMC-SIERRA – ADAPTEC
Throughout the 1990s, Adaptec was synonymous with SCSI, and had a lock on the SCSI controller/adapter market. The company reached its heyday when it racked up revenues of about $800 million in fiscal 2000. But Adaptec didn’t see the winds of change blowing.
PMC-Sierra acquired Adaptec this summer for a mere $34 million.
In addition to Adaptec’s technology and products, PMC acquired Adaptec’s extensive channel, where it is still strong in RAID adapters.
PMC-Sierra’s acquisition of Adaptec puts the company in even more intense competition with arch enemy LSI. Now PMC will compete in the channel with LSI at the board level, whereas previously the battle was fought primarily on the semiconductor front.
Related articles:
PMC-Sierra to buy Adaptec’s channel storage business
PMC-Sierra ships 6Gbps SAS controllers
#9: NETAPP – BYCAST
The terms of the NetApp-Bycast deal were not disclosed. According to our original article on the acquisition: “NetApp is advancing its efforts in the cloud storage market with the acquisition of Bycast, a developer of object-based storage virtualization software that turns multiple storage devices across geographically-dispersed locations into a single pool for storing fixed content data.”
See “NetApp to acquire Bycast for cloud storage software”
NetApp plans to leverage Bycast technology to go after markets such as digital media, Web 2.0, healthcare, and cloud services providers.
Bycast’s flagship product is its StorageGRID virtualization software. It will be interesting to see what happens to some of Bycast’s existing OEM deals, which include partnerships with IBM and HP.
#8: EMULEX – SERVERENGINES
Prior to acquiring ServerEngines, Emulex was in a dicey position: The company licensed critical technology, including 10GbE ASICs, from ServerEngines and that technology was key to Emulex’s (at the time) risky gamble of betting the farm on 10GbE (and going head-to-head with Ethernet giants Broadcom and Intel, in addition to long-time rival QLogic and others).
The position was dicey because a competitor could scoop up ServerEngines, thus pulling the rug from underneath Emulex’s strategy. Emulex paid a high price for ServerEngines, but there wasn’t any choice.
According to our original article on the acquisition: “Emulex will acquire ServerEngines for $78 million in cash and eight million shares of Emulex stock. Based on Emulex’s closing price of $10.11 last week, those eight million shares would translate into an additional $81 million, bringing the total to almost $160 million.”
But wait, there’s more: “In addition, Emulex will issue four million shares of stock if ServerEngines meets certain business objectives by the end of 2011. Emulex also agreed to assume ServerEngines’ debt, which is currently $25 million. As such, the deal could eventually exceed $200 million.”
See “Emulex to acquire ServerEngines”
The bet, and the acquisition, seem to have paid off. Emulex has racked up a number of OEM design wins for its 10GbE/FCoE/iSCSI converged network adapters (CNAs), including Dell, EMC, HDS, HP, IBM and NetApp.
ServerEngines was founded in 2004 by former Broadcom engineers that were previously with ServerWorks, which was acquired by Broadcom in 2001. In early 2009, Broadcom launched an unsuccessful hostile takeover of Emulex.
#7: DELL – OCARINA
Rumored to be in the $150 million ballpark, Dell’s acquisition of Ocarina came as a surprise to almost everybody, and (along with #6, see below) confirmed that capacity optimization (data deduplication and/or compression) of primary storage is The Next Big Thing.
According to my original blog post on this acquisition (see “Dell to acquire Ocarina for data deduplication”): “Until the announcement of its embeddable, OEM version of its software, Ocarina was known primarily as a vendor of data reduction technology for primary storage. But the embeddable version is applicable across the storage spectrum, from primary storage to backup and archive.”
I think Dell will initially leverage Ocarina’s technology in image-intensive, fixed-content applications on primary storage. That space is where, so far, Ocarina has made its mark, with large wins at companies such as Kodak. Dell will probably continue to resell Symantec, CommVault and Data Domain software where those companies’ technologies make more sense, or where customers demand it.
And in a related Top 10 acquisition . . .
#6: IBM – STORWIZE
This one had been rumored for weeks before IBM made it official, so it ranks low on the surprise factor but high on the industry influence scale. Even more than the Dell-Ocarina deal, and even more than NetApp’s evangelizing, IBM’s acquisition of data compression specialist Storwize put data reduction for primary storage in a top spot among Hot Storage Technologies.
Rumors put this deal in the range of $140 million.
Storwize’s data reduction technology differs from some of its competitors in that it is in-line, real-time compression, as opposed to data deduplication.
It’s certainly not an understatement to say that being acquired by IBM was the smartest thing Storwize did since changing its name from Storwiz.
The Storwize product line is now part of the IBM Real-time Compression business unit.
See “IBM to Buy Storwize for Real-Time Data Compression” on InfoStor partner site Enterprise Storage Forum.
#5: VISION SOLUTIONS – DOUBLE-TAKE
This one ranked high on the surprise factor and it also ranked high in dollars, being valued at $242 million.
That amounted to about $10.55 per Double-Take share. Double-Take went public in 2006 at about $11 a share.
Prior to the Vision Solutions announcement, it was well known that Double-Take was on the block, with vendors such as Dell and HP considered to be potential acquirers.
Vision Solutions specializes in data protection software for IBM systems, while Double-Take’s strengths are in backup, replication, disaster recovery and high availability software, primarily for Microsoft platforms.
See “Vision Solutions to acquire Double-Take”
#4: EMC – GREENPLUM
I never did find out exactly what EMC paid for Greenplum, a data warehousing and analytics specialist, but my (questionable) sources tell me that the acquisition payment would easily put the deal near the top of this list.
Greenplum claims more than 100 customers, including NASDAQ OMX, NYSE Euronext, Skype, Equifax and T-Mobile.
In addition to its massively parallel processing (MPP) Greenplum Database, the company has Greenplum Chorus, a cloud platform for collaboration and data sharing. Greenplum became the foundation of a new division within EMC’s Information Infrastructure business.
Greenplum is a nice fit with EMC’s cloud initiatives, but it also heats up the competition between EMC, Oracle, IBM and Sun.
See “EMC acquires data warehousing vendor Greenplum”
#3: DELL – COMPELLENT
This one may not be a done deal, but it’s pretty close so Dell’s “take-under” acquisition of Compellent takes the #3 spot on our list. The latest offer is $27.75 per share, which translates into about $960 million, or $820 million net of Compellent’s cash.
In a sense, Compellent is a consolation prize after Dell lost the bidding war with HP over 3PAR. Acquiring 3PAR would have solidified Dell’s position in high-end disk arrays, but Compellent fills out Dell’s mid-range (and slightly high-end) positioning.
It will be interesting to see how Dell positions Compellent’s disk arrays relative to the EqualLogic product line (which grew 66% in revenues over the last year), but it will be even more interesting to see what happens to Dell’s EMC reseller agreement.
#2: EMC – ISILON
EMC shelled out around $2.25 billion for scale-out NAS vendor Isilon Systems, net of Isilon’s existing cash balance. That’s an eye-popping amount of cash, particularly considering that Isilon was barely profitable, but market researcher IDC predicts that the scale-out NAS market will grow on average about 36% annually, reaching an estimated $6 billion in 2014.
According to EMC’s press release on the announcement: “EMC’s Atmos and Isilon’s solutions will offer customers a highly scalable, low-cost storage infrastructure for managing ‘Big Data’ . . . EMC Atmos object storage provides the perfect complement to Isilon for massive globally distributed environments and object access to data for usages like Web 2.0 applications.”
EMC officials estimate that the combined revenue from the Isilon and Atmos platforms will hit a $1 billion run rate during the second half of 2012. EMC also emphasized synergies between Isilon’s clustered scale-out NAS platforms and systems/software from Greenplum.
Isilon wasn’t EMC’s only acquisition this year. The company bought Bus-Tech about a week prior to the Isilon announcement. Bus-Tech specializes in VTL technology for mainframe environments. The financial terms of the Bus-Tech acquisition were not disclosed.
See “EMC snaps up Isilon for $2.25 billion” on InfoStor partner site Enterprise Storage Forum.
#1: HP – 3PAR
By virtue of its price ($2.4 billion) and the drama of the bidding war with Dell (which started at $1.15 billion), HP’s acquisition of 3PAR was clearly the #1 storage acquisition of 2010.
The acquisition of 3PAR puts HP in a much better competitive position, but it will be interesting to see what happens to the rest of HP’s disk array lineup. Does the 3PAR acquisition sound the death knell for the venerable EVA line? And what will be the fate of HP’s reseller deal with Hitachi? Months after the acquisition was announced, we still have more questions than answers on this acquisition.
2010 wasn’t a record-setting year in terms of the number of storage acquisitions, but it certainly was a record setter in terms of the amount of money that was shelled out.
As we enter 2011, the big question is: Who will be acquired next? According to the financial analyst community, CommVault is the most likely storage vendor to be acquired, but other possibilities cited by financial analysts include (in no particular order) Xiotech, Brocade, BlueArc, FalconStor and NetApp.
Related article:
Top 10 Storage Predictions for 2011 (by Henry Newman, on Enterprise Storage Forum)
Here's my revised list of the Top 10 storage acquisitions of 2010, in ascending order:
#10: PMC-SIERRA – ADAPTEC
Throughout the 1990s, Adaptec was synonymous with SCSI, and had a lock on the SCSI controller/adapter market. The company reached its heyday when it racked up revenues of about $800 million in fiscal 2000. But Adaptec didn’t see the winds of change blowing.
PMC-Sierra acquired Adaptec this summer for a mere $34 million.
In addition to Adaptec’s technology and products, PMC acquired Adaptec’s extensive channel, where it is still strong in RAID adapters.
PMC-Sierra’s acquisition of Adaptec puts the company in even more intense competition with arch enemy LSI. Now PMC will compete in the channel with LSI at the board level, whereas previously the battle was fought primarily on the semiconductor front.
Related articles:
PMC-Sierra to buy Adaptec’s channel storage business
PMC-Sierra ships 6Gbps SAS controllers
#9: NETAPP – BYCAST
The terms of the NetApp-Bycast deal were not disclosed. According to our original article on the acquisition: “NetApp is advancing its efforts in the cloud storage market with the acquisition of Bycast, a developer of object-based storage virtualization software that turns multiple storage devices across geographically-dispersed locations into a single pool for storing fixed content data.”
See “NetApp to acquire Bycast for cloud storage software”
NetApp plans to leverage Bycast technology to go after markets such as digital media, Web 2.0, healthcare, and cloud services providers.
Bycast’s flagship product is its StorageGRID virtualization software. It will be interesting to see what happens to some of Bycast’s existing OEM deals, which include partnerships with IBM and HP.
#8: EMULEX – SERVERENGINES
Prior to acquiring ServerEngines, Emulex was in a dicey position: The company licensed critical technology, including 10GbE ASICs, from ServerEngines and that technology was key to Emulex’s (at the time) risky gamble of betting the farm on 10GbE (and going head-to-head with Ethernet giants Broadcom and Intel, in addition to long-time rival QLogic and others).
The position was dicey because a competitor could scoop up ServerEngines, thus pulling the rug from underneath Emulex’s strategy. Emulex paid a high price for ServerEngines, but there wasn’t any choice.
According to our original article on the acquisition: “Emulex will acquire ServerEngines for $78 million in cash and eight million shares of Emulex stock. Based on Emulex’s closing price of $10.11 last week, those eight million shares would translate into an additional $81 million, bringing the total to almost $160 million.”
But wait, there’s more: “In addition, Emulex will issue four million shares of stock if ServerEngines meets certain business objectives by the end of 2011. Emulex also agreed to assume ServerEngines’ debt, which is currently $25 million. As such, the deal could eventually exceed $200 million.”
See “Emulex to acquire ServerEngines”
The bet, and the acquisition, seem to have paid off. Emulex has racked up a number of OEM design wins for its 10GbE/FCoE/iSCSI converged network adapters (CNAs), including Dell, EMC, HDS, HP, IBM and NetApp.
ServerEngines was founded in 2004 by former Broadcom engineers that were previously with ServerWorks, which was acquired by Broadcom in 2001. In early 2009, Broadcom launched an unsuccessful hostile takeover of Emulex.
#7: DELL – OCARINA
Rumored to be in the $150 million ballpark, Dell’s acquisition of Ocarina came as a surprise to almost everybody, and (along with #6, see below) confirmed that capacity optimization (data deduplication and/or compression) of primary storage is The Next Big Thing.
According to my original blog post on this acquisition (see “Dell to acquire Ocarina for data deduplication”): “Until the announcement of its embeddable, OEM version of its software, Ocarina was known primarily as a vendor of data reduction technology for primary storage. But the embeddable version is applicable across the storage spectrum, from primary storage to backup and archive.”
I think Dell will initially leverage Ocarina’s technology in image-intensive, fixed-content applications on primary storage. That space is where, so far, Ocarina has made its mark, with large wins at companies such as Kodak. Dell will probably continue to resell Symantec, CommVault and Data Domain software where those companies’ technologies make more sense, or where customers demand it.
And in a related Top 10 acquisition . . .
#6: IBM – STORWIZE
This one had been rumored for weeks before IBM made it official, so it ranks low on the surprise factor but high on the industry influence scale. Even more than the Dell-Ocarina deal, and even more than NetApp’s evangelizing, IBM’s acquisition of data compression specialist Storwize put data reduction for primary storage in a top spot among Hot Storage Technologies.
Rumors put this deal in the range of $140 million.
Storwize’s data reduction technology differs from some of its competitors in that it is in-line, real-time compression, as opposed to data deduplication.
It’s certainly not an understatement to say that being acquired by IBM was the smartest thing Storwize did since changing its name from Storwiz.
The Storwize product line is now part of the IBM Real-time Compression business unit.
See “IBM to Buy Storwize for Real-Time Data Compression” on InfoStor partner site Enterprise Storage Forum.
#5: VISION SOLUTIONS – DOUBLE-TAKE
This one ranked high on the surprise factor and it also ranked high in dollars, being valued at $242 million.
That amounted to about $10.55 per Double-Take share. Double-Take went public in 2006 at about $11 a share.
Prior to the Vision Solutions announcement, it was well known that Double-Take was on the block, with vendors such as Dell and HP considered to be potential acquirers.
Vision Solutions specializes in data protection software for IBM systems, while Double-Take’s strengths are in backup, replication, disaster recovery and high availability software, primarily for Microsoft platforms.
See “Vision Solutions to acquire Double-Take”
#4: EMC – GREENPLUM
I never did find out exactly what EMC paid for Greenplum, a data warehousing and analytics specialist, but my (questionable) sources tell me that the acquisition payment would easily put the deal near the top of this list.
Greenplum claims more than 100 customers, including NASDAQ OMX, NYSE Euronext, Skype, Equifax and T-Mobile.
In addition to its massively parallel processing (MPP) Greenplum Database, the company has Greenplum Chorus, a cloud platform for collaboration and data sharing. Greenplum became the foundation of a new division within EMC’s Information Infrastructure business.
Greenplum is a nice fit with EMC’s cloud initiatives, but it also heats up the competition between EMC, Oracle, IBM and Sun.
See “EMC acquires data warehousing vendor Greenplum”
#3: DELL – COMPELLENT
This one may not be a done deal, but it’s pretty close so Dell’s “take-under” acquisition of Compellent takes the #3 spot on our list. The latest offer is $27.75 per share, which translates into about $960 million, or $820 million net of Compellent’s cash.
In a sense, Compellent is a consolation prize after Dell lost the bidding war with HP over 3PAR. Acquiring 3PAR would have solidified Dell’s position in high-end disk arrays, but Compellent fills out Dell’s mid-range (and slightly high-end) positioning.
It will be interesting to see how Dell positions Compellent’s disk arrays relative to the EqualLogic product line (which grew 66% in revenues over the last year), but it will be even more interesting to see what happens to Dell’s EMC reseller agreement.
#2: EMC – ISILON
EMC shelled out around $2.25 billion for scale-out NAS vendor Isilon Systems, net of Isilon’s existing cash balance. That’s an eye-popping amount of cash, particularly considering that Isilon was barely profitable, but market researcher IDC predicts that the scale-out NAS market will grow on average about 36% annually, reaching an estimated $6 billion in 2014.
According to EMC’s press release on the announcement: “EMC’s Atmos and Isilon’s solutions will offer customers a highly scalable, low-cost storage infrastructure for managing ‘Big Data’ . . . EMC Atmos object storage provides the perfect complement to Isilon for massive globally distributed environments and object access to data for usages like Web 2.0 applications.”
EMC officials estimate that the combined revenue from the Isilon and Atmos platforms will hit a $1 billion run rate during the second half of 2012. EMC also emphasized synergies between Isilon’s clustered scale-out NAS platforms and systems/software from Greenplum.
Isilon wasn’t EMC’s only acquisition this year. The company bought Bus-Tech about a week prior to the Isilon announcement. Bus-Tech specializes in VTL technology for mainframe environments. The financial terms of the Bus-Tech acquisition were not disclosed.
See “EMC snaps up Isilon for $2.25 billion” on InfoStor partner site Enterprise Storage Forum.
#1: HP – 3PAR
By virtue of its price ($2.4 billion) and the drama of the bidding war with Dell (which started at $1.15 billion), HP’s acquisition of 3PAR was clearly the #1 storage acquisition of 2010.
The acquisition of 3PAR puts HP in a much better competitive position, but it will be interesting to see what happens to the rest of HP’s disk array lineup. Does the 3PAR acquisition sound the death knell for the venerable EVA line? And what will be the fate of HP’s reseller deal with Hitachi? Months after the acquisition was announced, we still have more questions than answers on this acquisition.
2010 wasn’t a record-setting year in terms of the number of storage acquisitions, but it certainly was a record setter in terms of the amount of money that was shelled out.
As we enter 2011, the big question is: Who will be acquired next? According to the financial analyst community, CommVault is the most likely storage vendor to be acquired, but other possibilities cited by financial analysts include (in no particular order) Xiotech, Brocade, BlueArc, FalconStor and NetApp.
Related article:
Top 10 Storage Predictions for 2011 (by Henry Newman, on Enterprise Storage Forum)
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
And the Top 6 storage software vendors are . . .
IDC recently released its Q3 2010 report on the storage software market, and there weren’t any changes on the leader board in terms of the top six vendors’ market shares in Q3 vs. Q2. EMC is still in the top spot with a 24.4% market share on revenue of $768 million in the third quarter.
Pure-play software vendor Symantec held on to its #2 ranking with a 16.5% share on revenue of $518 million, followed by IBM (13.4%) with revenue of $421 million and NetApp (8.4%) with $263 million.
The race is a bit tighter for fifth and sixth place, with CA (3.3%) pulling in $104 million and edging out #6 HP (3.2%, $99 million).
As was the case in the disk array market in the third quarter, the real winner appears to be NetApp, which experienced a growth rate of 19.8% in Q3 2010 vs. Q3 2009. EMC had the second highest growth rate at 13.9%. HP was the only vendor to have negative growth (-9.4%).
The overall storage software market racked up $3.1 billion in revenue, for a growth rate of 8.7% over the same quarter a year ago and a 6.3% boost over the previous quarter, according to Laura DuBois, IDC’s program vice president, storage software.
In terms of storage market segment growth, the top three were storage infrastructure (+37.3% year-over-year), archiving (+12%) and data protection and recovery (+10.7%).
DuBois notes that the big boost in storage infrastructure can be attributed largely to increased spending on automated storage tiering. Other segments of the storage software market include replication, storage management, device management, and file systems.
For more info, see IDC’s press release: “Storage Software Market Continues on Its Growth Trajectory in the Third Quarter”
Related blog post: “Disk arrays: NetApp, HP duke it out for #3 spot”
Pure-play software vendor Symantec held on to its #2 ranking with a 16.5% share on revenue of $518 million, followed by IBM (13.4%) with revenue of $421 million and NetApp (8.4%) with $263 million.
The race is a bit tighter for fifth and sixth place, with CA (3.3%) pulling in $104 million and edging out #6 HP (3.2%, $99 million).
As was the case in the disk array market in the third quarter, the real winner appears to be NetApp, which experienced a growth rate of 19.8% in Q3 2010 vs. Q3 2009. EMC had the second highest growth rate at 13.9%. HP was the only vendor to have negative growth (-9.4%).
The overall storage software market racked up $3.1 billion in revenue, for a growth rate of 8.7% over the same quarter a year ago and a 6.3% boost over the previous quarter, according to Laura DuBois, IDC’s program vice president, storage software.
In terms of storage market segment growth, the top three were storage infrastructure (+37.3% year-over-year), archiving (+12%) and data protection and recovery (+10.7%).
DuBois notes that the big boost in storage infrastructure can be attributed largely to increased spending on automated storage tiering. Other segments of the storage software market include replication, storage management, device management, and file systems.
For more info, see IDC’s press release: “Storage Software Market Continues on Its Growth Trajectory in the Third Quarter”
Related blog post: “Disk arrays: NetApp, HP duke it out for #3 spot”
Friday, December 3, 2010
Disk arrays: NetApp, HP duke it out for #3 spot
December 3, 2010 – In more good news for the rebounding storage industry, revenues from external disk systems grew 19% in Q3 2010 vs. Q3 2009, topping the $5 billion mark, according to a report from IDC. Revenues for the total (external and internal) disk systems market grew to almost $7 billion, representing an 18.5% year-over-year growth rate.
Total capacity shipped grew 65.2%.
In the external array market, EMC held on to its #1 spot by a wide margin, with $1.35 billion in Q3 revenue and a 26.1% market share. IBM was a distant second with $667 million in revenue and a 12.9% market share.
But the real race is for the #3 position, where NetApp and HP are in a virtual dead heat. (Even dead heats are virtual these days.) NetApp had an 11.6% market share in Q3, followed closely by HP with an 11.1% slice. IDC considers it to be a statistical tie when less than a one percent revenue difference separates two vendors.
Dell finished fifth, with a 9.1% market share on revenue of $471 million.
All of the top five vendors had healthy, double-digit revenue growth (ranging from 11.3% for HP to 28.3% for EMC), but it was NetApp that busted the charts with a whopping 54.9% growth rate.
Looking at the leader board trends over the past few quarters, it would seem safe to say that NetApp has blown past HP and is closing in on Big Blue, except for HP’s 3PAR acquisition. With HP’s marketing muscle behind the 3PAR product line, revenue could crank up pretty quickly. For now, however, 3PAR had a market share of only 0.83% in the third quarter. (Isilon’s slice was 0.75%.)
Other highlights from the IDC report: The NAS market was the fastest-growing segment of the overall storage systems market, posting 49.8% growth in Q3 2010 vs. Q3 2009. EMC led the NAS market with a 46.6% share, followed by NetApp with a 28.9% share.
The iSCSI segment of the overall market also did well, posting 41.4% revenue growth, with Dell/EqualLogic in the top spot (33.8% share) followed by EMC and HP in a tie for second place.
For more details, read the IDC press release: “External Disk Storage Systems Market Records Fourth-Highest Quarterly Revenue in Third Quarter”
Total capacity shipped grew 65.2%.
In the external array market, EMC held on to its #1 spot by a wide margin, with $1.35 billion in Q3 revenue and a 26.1% market share. IBM was a distant second with $667 million in revenue and a 12.9% market share.
But the real race is for the #3 position, where NetApp and HP are in a virtual dead heat. (Even dead heats are virtual these days.) NetApp had an 11.6% market share in Q3, followed closely by HP with an 11.1% slice. IDC considers it to be a statistical tie when less than a one percent revenue difference separates two vendors.
Dell finished fifth, with a 9.1% market share on revenue of $471 million.
All of the top five vendors had healthy, double-digit revenue growth (ranging from 11.3% for HP to 28.3% for EMC), but it was NetApp that busted the charts with a whopping 54.9% growth rate.
Looking at the leader board trends over the past few quarters, it would seem safe to say that NetApp has blown past HP and is closing in on Big Blue, except for HP’s 3PAR acquisition. With HP’s marketing muscle behind the 3PAR product line, revenue could crank up pretty quickly. For now, however, 3PAR had a market share of only 0.83% in the third quarter. (Isilon’s slice was 0.75%.)
Other highlights from the IDC report: The NAS market was the fastest-growing segment of the overall storage systems market, posting 49.8% growth in Q3 2010 vs. Q3 2009. EMC led the NAS market with a 46.6% share, followed by NetApp with a 28.9% share.
The iSCSI segment of the overall market also did well, posting 41.4% revenue growth, with Dell/EqualLogic in the top spot (33.8% share) followed by EMC and HP in a tie for second place.
For more details, read the IDC press release: “External Disk Storage Systems Market Records Fourth-Highest Quarterly Revenue in Third Quarter”
Monday, November 29, 2010
VCs score big in EMC-Isilon deal
November 29, 2010 – Whenever there’s a blockbuster acquisition such as EMC’s $2.25 billion buyout of Isilon, it’s interesting to speculate about what the marriage will mean to customers and competitors. But one angle I never look into is what the acquisition means to the venture capitalists (VCs) behind the acquired company.
According to a blog post on The Wall Street Journal’s wsj.com, the VCs behind Isilon made out quite well (see “EMC-Isilon Deal Is Another Data-Storage Win for VCs”).
According to that article: Atlas Ventures and Madrona Group, which provided Isilon with its Series A funding in 2001, as well as Sequoia Capital, which led the company’s Series B funding, all held significant stakes in Isilon.
Atlas said it will reap $473 million from the EMC-Isilon acquisition, or 20X its initial investment.
Madrona will get more than 15X the $15 million it invested, or $225 million+, according to a Madrona representative.
Sequoia Capital (which apparently did not sell any of its holdings prior to the acquisition announcement), will score $394.4 million.
Isilon was founded almost 10 years ago by Sujal Patel. The company went public in late 2006 at $13 a share. Going public was rocky in the beginning, with shares falling about 50% in the first year. Isilon’s stock price kept sliding through 2008 and 2009, when investors such as Atlas and Madrona added to their holdings.
Under the terms of the agreement announced a couple weeks ago, EMC will pay $33.85 per Isilon share.
Read the full blog post at wsj.com: “EMC-Isilon Deal Is Another Data-Storage Win for VCs”
According to a blog post on The Wall Street Journal’s wsj.com, the VCs behind Isilon made out quite well (see “EMC-Isilon Deal Is Another Data-Storage Win for VCs”).
According to that article: Atlas Ventures and Madrona Group, which provided Isilon with its Series A funding in 2001, as well as Sequoia Capital, which led the company’s Series B funding, all held significant stakes in Isilon.
Atlas said it will reap $473 million from the EMC-Isilon acquisition, or 20X its initial investment.
Madrona will get more than 15X the $15 million it invested, or $225 million+, according to a Madrona representative.
Sequoia Capital (which apparently did not sell any of its holdings prior to the acquisition announcement), will score $394.4 million.
Isilon was founded almost 10 years ago by Sujal Patel. The company went public in late 2006 at $13 a share. Going public was rocky in the beginning, with shares falling about 50% in the first year. Isilon’s stock price kept sliding through 2008 and 2009, when investors such as Atlas and Madrona added to their holdings.
Under the terms of the agreement announced a couple weeks ago, EMC will pay $33.85 per Isilon share.
Read the full blog post at wsj.com: “EMC-Isilon Deal Is Another Data-Storage Win for VCs”
Monday, November 15, 2010
EMC’s $2.25 billion bid for Isilon exceeds expectations
November 15, 2010 – I was wrong. When I blogged about EMC possibly acquiring Isilon late last week, I guessed that EMC would indeed buy the scale-out NAS vendor but at a price considerably less than the rumored $2 billion. In fact, EMC’s bid came in at $2.25 billion today – which is surprisingly close to HP’s $2.4 billion buyout of 3PAR.
Some observers have speculated that the $2.25 billion suggests that there were other suitors involved. I don’t think so. I think EMC wanted to seal the deal without a bidding war, and $2.25 billion should do the trick.
EMC’s positioning of the deal was interesting. Predictably, the words “big data” and “cloud” came up a lot in EMC officials’ explanation of the deal, but so did the synergies between Isilon’s platforms and EMC’s Atmos platform.
According to EMC’s press release on the announcement: “EMC’s Atmos and Isilon’s solutions will offer customers a highly scalable, low-cost storage infrastructure for managing ‘Big Data.’ . . . EMC Atmos object storage provides the perfect complement to Isilon for massive globally distributed environments and object access to data for usages like Web 2.0 applications.”
EMC went on to estimate that the combined revenue from the Isilon and Atmos platforms will hit a $1 billion run rate during the second half of 2012.
EMC also emphasized synergies between Isilon’s clustered scale-out NAS platforms and systems/software from Greenplum, which EMC acquired earlier this year.
In short, all of these acquisitions are complementary, not internally competitive. Nice positioning, and in fact it’s true. It’s rare that a vendor can make acquisitions of these sizes without having to shake up its existing product lineup (which is what HP will have to do as it folds 3PAR’s systems into HP’s venerable disk array lineup).
Not surprisingly, the EMC-Isilon announcement sparked more acquisition rumors, but now vendors that play in Isilon’s ballpark are getting some attention, including BlueArc (to be acquired by long-time partner Hitachi Data Systems?) and Panasas, which is moving into more commercial markets (see “Panasas Pushes Scale-Out Storage Performance Envelope” on Enterprise Storage Forum).
If $2.25 billion seems like a high price to pay for a barely profitable Isilon, consider the fact that IDC predicts that the market for scale-out NAS will grow on average 36% per year, reaching $6 billion by 2014.
Related articles:
EMC snaps up Isilon for $2.25 billion (Enterprise Storage Forum)
Isilon revenue up 77% (InfoStor blog post)
NetApp overhauls product line, from arrays to OS (InfoStor news story)
Some observers have speculated that the $2.25 billion suggests that there were other suitors involved. I don’t think so. I think EMC wanted to seal the deal without a bidding war, and $2.25 billion should do the trick.
EMC’s positioning of the deal was interesting. Predictably, the words “big data” and “cloud” came up a lot in EMC officials’ explanation of the deal, but so did the synergies between Isilon’s platforms and EMC’s Atmos platform.
According to EMC’s press release on the announcement: “EMC’s Atmos and Isilon’s solutions will offer customers a highly scalable, low-cost storage infrastructure for managing ‘Big Data.’ . . . EMC Atmos object storage provides the perfect complement to Isilon for massive globally distributed environments and object access to data for usages like Web 2.0 applications.”
EMC went on to estimate that the combined revenue from the Isilon and Atmos platforms will hit a $1 billion run rate during the second half of 2012.
EMC also emphasized synergies between Isilon’s clustered scale-out NAS platforms and systems/software from Greenplum, which EMC acquired earlier this year.
In short, all of these acquisitions are complementary, not internally competitive. Nice positioning, and in fact it’s true. It’s rare that a vendor can make acquisitions of these sizes without having to shake up its existing product lineup (which is what HP will have to do as it folds 3PAR’s systems into HP’s venerable disk array lineup).
Not surprisingly, the EMC-Isilon announcement sparked more acquisition rumors, but now vendors that play in Isilon’s ballpark are getting some attention, including BlueArc (to be acquired by long-time partner Hitachi Data Systems?) and Panasas, which is moving into more commercial markets (see “Panasas Pushes Scale-Out Storage Performance Envelope” on Enterprise Storage Forum).
If $2.25 billion seems like a high price to pay for a barely profitable Isilon, consider the fact that IDC predicts that the market for scale-out NAS will grow on average 36% per year, reaching $6 billion by 2014.
Related articles:
EMC snaps up Isilon for $2.25 billion (Enterprise Storage Forum)
Isilon revenue up 77% (InfoStor blog post)
NetApp overhauls product line, from arrays to OS (InfoStor news story)
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Isilon stock volatility stabilizes, but acquisition speculation stays
November 11, 2010 – The bidding war between HP and Dell that ended in HP’s $2.4 billion buyout of 3PAR has sent a number of storage vendors’ stock prices skyward. One good example was Isilon.
Fueled by a combination of acquisition rumors and a stellar quarterly financial report (see “Isilon revenue up 77%”), Isilon’s shares hit an all-time high of $29.48 late last month. The 52-week trading range: a shocking $5.32 to $29.48.
More recently, shares of Isilon (NASDAQ: ISLN) seem to have stabilized, closing at about $26 today.
EMC was reportedly in deep and exclusive talks with Isilon regarding a buyout, with the New York Post reporting that deal was in the $2 billion neighborhood (where 3PAR lived). More recently, various reports said that the EMC-Isilon talks were either dead (because of the pricey neighborhood) or stalled. I’d bet on the latter.
Realistically, I don’t think that (the barely profitable) Isilon can get $2 billion+ from anybody. So I’d still say that EMC is the most likely acquirer.
However, assuming that EMC is out of the bidding, financial analysts cite the usual suspects as possible bidders: Dell, NetApp, HP, IBM and Oracle – usually in that order. However, a bidding war a la HP vs. Dell for 3PAR will be highly unlikely this time around, in part (as I’ve said before) Isilon’s technology is great but it’s a product line gap plugger rather than the game changer that 3PAR would have been for Dell and could be for HP.
Financial analysts such as Morningstar’s Mike Holt, on thestar.com, cite Dell as the most likely candidate to snap up Isilon. However, rather than take what would be sort of a consolation prize after losing its bid for 3PAR, I’m guessing that Dell heads in a different (non-storage) direction in its acquisitions. And besides, Dell has the Exanet technology.
Isilon’s clustered scale-out NAS technology would fit nicely into NetApp’s lineup, but NetApp has shed a lot of blood, sweat, tears and money integrating the Spinnaker technology, and acquiring Isilon would be a lot of expensive crow to eat.
With Isilon’s hiring of Qatalyst Partners (which shepherded the 3PAR bidding), it seems quite likely that Isilon will be acquired. Then again, given the company’s traction and recent earnings report, the Isilon could very well go it alone.
Related blog post: “Isilon revenue up 77%”
Fueled by a combination of acquisition rumors and a stellar quarterly financial report (see “Isilon revenue up 77%”), Isilon’s shares hit an all-time high of $29.48 late last month. The 52-week trading range: a shocking $5.32 to $29.48.
More recently, shares of Isilon (NASDAQ: ISLN) seem to have stabilized, closing at about $26 today.
EMC was reportedly in deep and exclusive talks with Isilon regarding a buyout, with the New York Post reporting that deal was in the $2 billion neighborhood (where 3PAR lived). More recently, various reports said that the EMC-Isilon talks were either dead (because of the pricey neighborhood) or stalled. I’d bet on the latter.
Realistically, I don’t think that (the barely profitable) Isilon can get $2 billion+ from anybody. So I’d still say that EMC is the most likely acquirer.
However, assuming that EMC is out of the bidding, financial analysts cite the usual suspects as possible bidders: Dell, NetApp, HP, IBM and Oracle – usually in that order. However, a bidding war a la HP vs. Dell for 3PAR will be highly unlikely this time around, in part (as I’ve said before) Isilon’s technology is great but it’s a product line gap plugger rather than the game changer that 3PAR would have been for Dell and could be for HP.
Financial analysts such as Morningstar’s Mike Holt, on thestar.com, cite Dell as the most likely candidate to snap up Isilon. However, rather than take what would be sort of a consolation prize after losing its bid for 3PAR, I’m guessing that Dell heads in a different (non-storage) direction in its acquisitions. And besides, Dell has the Exanet technology.
Isilon’s clustered scale-out NAS technology would fit nicely into NetApp’s lineup, but NetApp has shed a lot of blood, sweat, tears and money integrating the Spinnaker technology, and acquiring Isilon would be a lot of expensive crow to eat.
With Isilon’s hiring of Qatalyst Partners (which shepherded the 3PAR bidding), it seems quite likely that Isilon will be acquired. Then again, given the company’s traction and recent earnings report, the Isilon could very well go it alone.
Related blog post: “Isilon revenue up 77%”
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
The Top 6 storage software vendors
September 16, 2010 -- There hasn't been much change over the last year in terms of market shares for the Top 6 storage software vendors.
IDC recently released its quarterly report on the market, and EMC held on to its #1 ranking with a 24.4% market share on Q2 2010 revenue of $722 million, followed by Symantec at #2 (16.5% share, $488 in revenue), #3 IBM (13.9%, $410 million) and #4 NetApp (8.7%, $256 million).
Rounding out the Top 6 were CA and HP in a statistical tie. CA had a 3.6% market share on revenue of $108 million, and HP had a 3.3% share with revenue of $97 million. The only change in the lineup between Q2 2010 and Q2 2009 was a switch in positions between CA and HP.
In terms of revenue growth over the last 12 months, there were four gainers and two losers. Gainers included EMC (+13.3%), IBM (+10.6%), NetApp (+6%) and CA (+2%). Symantec (-6.9%) and HP (-10.3%) declined year-over-year.
Overall, the storage software market hit almost $3 billion in the second quarter, a 3.3% growth vs. the same period a year ago.
IDC segments the storage software market into eight product categories. Of those, the segments experiencing the most growth over the last year included storage infrastructure (+12.7%), archiving (+8.2%), storage management (+5.8%), and data protection and recovery (+4.9%).
For more details, see IDC's press release, "Storage Software Market Delivers Continued Growth in the Second Quarter."
Related blog post:
The Top 5 array vendors: HP #4, Dell #5
IDC recently released its quarterly report on the market, and EMC held on to its #1 ranking with a 24.4% market share on Q2 2010 revenue of $722 million, followed by Symantec at #2 (16.5% share, $488 in revenue), #3 IBM (13.9%, $410 million) and #4 NetApp (8.7%, $256 million).
Rounding out the Top 6 were CA and HP in a statistical tie. CA had a 3.6% market share on revenue of $108 million, and HP had a 3.3% share with revenue of $97 million. The only change in the lineup between Q2 2010 and Q2 2009 was a switch in positions between CA and HP.
In terms of revenue growth over the last 12 months, there were four gainers and two losers. Gainers included EMC (+13.3%), IBM (+10.6%), NetApp (+6%) and CA (+2%). Symantec (-6.9%) and HP (-10.3%) declined year-over-year.
Overall, the storage software market hit almost $3 billion in the second quarter, a 3.3% growth vs. the same period a year ago.
IDC segments the storage software market into eight product categories. Of those, the segments experiencing the most growth over the last year included storage infrastructure (+12.7%), archiving (+8.2%), storage management (+5.8%), and data protection and recovery (+4.9%).
For more details, see IDC's press release, "Storage Software Market Delivers Continued Growth in the Second Quarter."
Related blog post:
The Top 5 array vendors: HP #4, Dell #5
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Top 10 storage acquisitions of 2010
UPDATED August 16, 2010 – I originally posted this Top 10 acquisitions piece last week, with EMC's acquisition of Greenplum in the #1 spot. Today's announcement that Dell plans to acquire 3PAR for a whopping $1.15 billion clearly catapults that deal into the #1 position. As such, here's my revised list of the Top 10 storage acquisitions of 2010, in ascending order:
#10: EXAR – NETERION
This one probably wouldn’t have made the Top 10 list except for the fact that it’s Exar’s second storage-related acquisition in the last year, indicating that this relatively unknown vendor is up to something in the storage market.
The acquisition of Hifn last year put Exar in the storage optimization market with data deduplication, compression and encryption technology. Which put them into discussions that include Storwize (acquired by IBM, see below), Ocarina Networks (acquired by Dell, see below) and Permabit.
The acquisition of Neterion this year (reportedly for $10 million to $11 million) puts Exar in the 10GbE/FCoE adapter space, and might get them a place in conversations typically focused on vendors such as Emulex, QLogic, Brocade, Broadcom and Intel.
“We see a lot of synergy between Neterion’s virtual I/O technology and Hifn’s data compression, security [encryption] and data deduplication technologies,” said John Williams, vice president of Exar’s datacom and storage business.”
Interesting, but does an engineering-focused company have the marketing might to compete with the big boys? Well, Neterion OEMs include EMC, HP, IBM, Fujitsu and Hitachi, so the company at least knows how to play with the big boys.
See “Exar to acquire Neterion”
#9: SOLARWINDS – TEK-TOOLS
As with Exar, this one made the Top 10 list in large part due to the surprise factor: Few in the storage world had ever heard of SolarWinds, which specializes in network and applications management software.
Tek-Tools has for a long time specialized in storage resource management (SRM) tools, and SolarWinds plans to integrate Tek-Tools’ Profiler SRM suite into its Orion portfolio by the end of this year. Sounds like a good fit, but since when did any acquisition-driven integration project get completed on schedule?
SolarWinds paid $42 million for Tek-Tools. And if that seems steep, consider the fact that Tek-Tools partners and resellers include 3PAR, AdviStor, Agami, Bell Micro, Brocade, CA, Cambridge Computer, CDW, Dell, EMC, GlassHouse, the Harding Group, HP, IBM, Kisdata, LSI, the Microsoft Developer Network, MySQL AB, NetApp, Novell, PC Mall, Quantum, Red Hat, Siemens Business, Sun, Syncsort, Techmate, VMware and Xiotech.
See “SolarWinds acquires Tek-Tools for SRM”
#8: PMC-SIERRA – ADAPTEC
Throughout the 1990s, Adaptec was synonymous with SCSI, and had a lock on the SCSI controller/adapter market. The company reached its heyday when it racked up revenues of about $800 million in fiscal 2000. But Adaptec didn’t see the winds of change blowing. PMC-Sierra acquired Adaptec for $34 million.
In addition to Adaptec’s technology and products, PMC acquired Adaptec’s extensive channel, where it is still strong in RAID adapters.
The interesting thing about this acquisition is that it puts PMC-Sierra in even more intense competition with arch enemy LSI. Now PMC will compete in the channel with LSI at the board level, whereas previously the battle was fought on the semiconductor front.
See “PMC-Sierra to buy Adaptec’s channel storage business”
#7: NETAPP – BYCAST
The terms of this deal were not disclosed. According to our original article on the acquisition: “NetApp is advancing its efforts in the cloud storage market with the acquisition of Bycast, a developer of object-based storage virtualization software that turns multiple storage devices across geographically dispersed locations into a single pool for storing fixed content data.”
See “NetApp to acquire Bycast for cloud storage software.”
NetApp plans to leverage Bycast technology to go after markets such as digital media, Web 2.0, healthcare, and cloud services providers.
Bycast’s flagship product is its StorageGRID virtualization software. It will be interesting to see what happens to some of Bycast’s existing OEM deals, which include partnerships with IBM and HP.
#6: EMULEX – SERVERENGINES
Prior to acquiring ServerEngines, Emulex was in a dicey position: The company licensed critical technology, including 10GbE ASICs, from ServerEngines and that technology was key to Emulex’s (at the time) risky gamble of betting the farm on 10GbE – a market owned largely by Broadcom and Intel.
The position was dicey because a competitor could scoop up ServerEngines, thus pulling the rug from underneath Emulex’s (at the time) loose footing. Emulex paid a high price for ServerEngines, but there wasn’t any choice.
According to our original article on the acquisition: “Emulex will acquire ServerEngines for $78 million in cash and eight million shares of Emulex stock. Based on Emulex’s closing price of $10.11 last week, those eight million shares would translate into an additional $81 million, bringing the total to almost $160 million.”
But wait, there’s more: “In addition, Emulex will issue four million shares of stock if ServerEngines meets certain business objectives by the end of 2011. Emulex also agreed to assume ServerEngines’ debt, which is currently $25 million. As such, the deal could eventually exceed $200 million.”
See “Emulex to acquire ServerEngines.”
The bet, and the acquisition, seem to have paid off. Emulex has racked up a number of OEM design wins for its 10GbE/FCoE/iSCSI converged network adapters (CNAs), most notably with HP. This puts Emulex at the table with Intel and Broadcom (which it beat out for the HP business) and may strengthen its position vs. QLogic and Brocade. In addition to HP, Emulex has design wins with vendors such as Dell, EMC, HDS, HP, IBM and NetApp.
ServerEngines was founded in 2004 by former Broadcom engineers that were previously with ServerWorks, which was acquired by Broadcom in 2001. In early 2009, Broadcom launched an unsuccessful hostile takeover of Emulex.
#5: DELL – OCARINA
Rumored to be in the $150 million ballpark, Dell’s acquisition of Ocarina came as a surprise to almost everybody. And this one (along with #4, see below) confirmed that storage optimization (data deduplication and/or compression) of primary storage is The Next Big Thing.
According to my original blog post on this acquisition (see “Dell to acquire Ocarina for data deduplication”): “Until the announcement of its embeddable, OEM version of its software, Ocarina was known primarily as a vendor of data reduction technology for primary storage. But the embeddable version is applicable across the storage spectrum, from primary storage to backup and archive.”
That led some analysts to predict that Dell is pursuing a one-size-fits-all approach to data deduplication where Ocarina’s technology will be used across the storage spectrum. If true, that would be bad news for Dell dedupe partners Symantec, CommVault and maybe even EMC Data Domain. But I don’t think that’s Dell’s game plan, at least not for the foreseeable future.
I think Dell will initially leverage Ocarina’s technology in specific image-intensive, fixed-content applications, and only on primary storage. That space is where, so far, Ocarina has made its mark, with large wins at companies such as Kodak. Dell will continue to use Symantec, CommVault and Data Domain where those companies’ technologies make more sense, or where customers demand it.
Besides, the Ocarina technology could be used in conjunction with deduplication technology from vendors such as Symantec and CommVault.
And in a related Top 10 acquisition . . .
#4: IBM – STORWIZE
This one had been rumored for weeks before IBM made it official, so it ranks low on the surprise factor but high on the industry influence scale. Even more than the Dell-Ocarina deal, and even more than NetApp’s evangelizing, IBM’s acquisition of data compression specialist Storwize put data reduction for primary storage in the #1 spot among Hot Storage Technologies.
Rumors put this deal in the range of $140 million.
IBM didn’t lay out specific plans, and it already has some good data reduction technology, but it looks like Big Blue will apply the Storwize technology to its high-end XIV system, Scale-Out Network Attached Storage (SONAS) platform, System Storage Easy Tier, and maybe even its ProtecTIER deduplication products.
Storwize’s data reduction technology differs from some of its competitors in that it is in-line, real-time compression, as opposed to data deduplication.
It’s certainly not an understatement to say that being acquired by IBM was the smartest thing Storwize did since changing its name from Storwiz.
Read the full story on InfoStor partner site Enterprise Storage Forum: “IBM to Buy Storwize for Real-Time Data Compression.” And check out Kevin Komiega’s blog post: “IBM to Acquire Storwize.”
#3: VISION SOLUTIONS – DOUBLE-TAKE
This one ranked high on the surprise factor (because Vision Solutions isn’t exactly well-known in the storage community) and it also ranked high on dollars, being valued at $242 million. Those two factors earned it the #2 ranking, although IBM-Storwize and Dell-Ocarina may be more interesting and certainly got a lot more ink.
The $242 million amounted to about $10.55 per Double-Take share. Double-Take went public in 2006 at about $11 a share.
Prior to the Vision Solutions announcement, it was well known that Double-Take was on the block, but the smart money was on vendors such as Dell and HP as potential acquirers.
Vision Solutions specializes in data protection software for IBM systems, while Double-Take’s strengths are in backup, replication, disaster recovery and high availability software, primarily for Microsoft platforms.
See “Vision Solutions to acquire Double-Take”
#2: EMC – GREENPLUM
I never did find out exactly what EMC paid for Greenplum, a data warehousing and analytics specialist, but my (questionable) sources tell me that the acquisition payment would easily put the deal near the top of this list. And besides, what would a Top 10 Storage Acquisitions list be without an EMC entry?
Greenplum claims more than 100 customers, including NASDAQ OMX, NYSE Euronext, Skype, Equifax and T-Mobile.
In addition to its massively parallel processing (MPP) Greenplum Database, the company has Greenplum Chorus, a cloud platform for collaboration and data sharing. Greenplum will become the foundation of a new division within EMC’s Information Infrastructure business.
So it’s a nice fit with EMC’s private cloud initiatives, but it also roughens up the competition between EMC, Oracle, IBM and Sun. Do you have a feeling that there’s at least one more big – very big – acquisition on the way?
See “EMC acquires data warehousing vendor Greenplum.”
#1: DELL -- 3PAR
At approximately $1.15 billion, Dell's planned acquisition of 3PAR is in the same ballpark as EMC's acquisition of Data Domain last year, both of which qualify as game changers.
Dell has commenced a tender offer to acquire all outstanding shares of 3PAR stock for $18 a share, or about an 86% permium over 3PAR's closing price on Friday.
That hefty price tag suggests that there were other bidders for 3PAR. And if anyone doubted that Dell wants to be a real (as opposed to reseller) player in the storage space, the 3PAR acquisition should assuage those doubts.
This announcement will probably once again call into question Dell's reseller partnership with EMC, but I don't see why. The Dell-EMC marriage will run its course one way or the other, but the outcome won't have anything to do with the 3PAR deal.
However, when you look at all of Dell's storage acquisitions (3PAR, Ocarina, EqualLogic, Exanet, Scalent and probably more to come), Dell and EMC could be on an accelerated path to splitsville. (Reportedly, Dell says that there is only about a 20% overlap between the 3PAR and Dell/EMC product lines.)
Historically, the summer months have been ripe for storage acquisitions so, given the prevailing climate, fasten your seatbelts. I may have to update this Top 10 list within the next two weeks.
#10: EXAR – NETERION
This one probably wouldn’t have made the Top 10 list except for the fact that it’s Exar’s second storage-related acquisition in the last year, indicating that this relatively unknown vendor is up to something in the storage market.
The acquisition of Hifn last year put Exar in the storage optimization market with data deduplication, compression and encryption technology. Which put them into discussions that include Storwize (acquired by IBM, see below), Ocarina Networks (acquired by Dell, see below) and Permabit.
The acquisition of Neterion this year (reportedly for $10 million to $11 million) puts Exar in the 10GbE/FCoE adapter space, and might get them a place in conversations typically focused on vendors such as Emulex, QLogic, Brocade, Broadcom and Intel.
“We see a lot of synergy between Neterion’s virtual I/O technology and Hifn’s data compression, security [encryption] and data deduplication technologies,” said John Williams, vice president of Exar’s datacom and storage business.”
Interesting, but does an engineering-focused company have the marketing might to compete with the big boys? Well, Neterion OEMs include EMC, HP, IBM, Fujitsu and Hitachi, so the company at least knows how to play with the big boys.
See “Exar to acquire Neterion”
#9: SOLARWINDS – TEK-TOOLS
As with Exar, this one made the Top 10 list in large part due to the surprise factor: Few in the storage world had ever heard of SolarWinds, which specializes in network and applications management software.
Tek-Tools has for a long time specialized in storage resource management (SRM) tools, and SolarWinds plans to integrate Tek-Tools’ Profiler SRM suite into its Orion portfolio by the end of this year. Sounds like a good fit, but since when did any acquisition-driven integration project get completed on schedule?
SolarWinds paid $42 million for Tek-Tools. And if that seems steep, consider the fact that Tek-Tools partners and resellers include 3PAR, AdviStor, Agami, Bell Micro, Brocade, CA, Cambridge Computer, CDW, Dell, EMC, GlassHouse, the Harding Group, HP, IBM, Kisdata, LSI, the Microsoft Developer Network, MySQL AB, NetApp, Novell, PC Mall, Quantum, Red Hat, Siemens Business, Sun, Syncsort, Techmate, VMware and Xiotech.
See “SolarWinds acquires Tek-Tools for SRM”
#8: PMC-SIERRA – ADAPTEC
Throughout the 1990s, Adaptec was synonymous with SCSI, and had a lock on the SCSI controller/adapter market. The company reached its heyday when it racked up revenues of about $800 million in fiscal 2000. But Adaptec didn’t see the winds of change blowing. PMC-Sierra acquired Adaptec for $34 million.
In addition to Adaptec’s technology and products, PMC acquired Adaptec’s extensive channel, where it is still strong in RAID adapters.
The interesting thing about this acquisition is that it puts PMC-Sierra in even more intense competition with arch enemy LSI. Now PMC will compete in the channel with LSI at the board level, whereas previously the battle was fought on the semiconductor front.
See “PMC-Sierra to buy Adaptec’s channel storage business”
#7: NETAPP – BYCAST
The terms of this deal were not disclosed. According to our original article on the acquisition: “NetApp is advancing its efforts in the cloud storage market with the acquisition of Bycast, a developer of object-based storage virtualization software that turns multiple storage devices across geographically dispersed locations into a single pool for storing fixed content data.”
See “NetApp to acquire Bycast for cloud storage software.”
NetApp plans to leverage Bycast technology to go after markets such as digital media, Web 2.0, healthcare, and cloud services providers.
Bycast’s flagship product is its StorageGRID virtualization software. It will be interesting to see what happens to some of Bycast’s existing OEM deals, which include partnerships with IBM and HP.
#6: EMULEX – SERVERENGINES
Prior to acquiring ServerEngines, Emulex was in a dicey position: The company licensed critical technology, including 10GbE ASICs, from ServerEngines and that technology was key to Emulex’s (at the time) risky gamble of betting the farm on 10GbE – a market owned largely by Broadcom and Intel.
The position was dicey because a competitor could scoop up ServerEngines, thus pulling the rug from underneath Emulex’s (at the time) loose footing. Emulex paid a high price for ServerEngines, but there wasn’t any choice.
According to our original article on the acquisition: “Emulex will acquire ServerEngines for $78 million in cash and eight million shares of Emulex stock. Based on Emulex’s closing price of $10.11 last week, those eight million shares would translate into an additional $81 million, bringing the total to almost $160 million.”
But wait, there’s more: “In addition, Emulex will issue four million shares of stock if ServerEngines meets certain business objectives by the end of 2011. Emulex also agreed to assume ServerEngines’ debt, which is currently $25 million. As such, the deal could eventually exceed $200 million.”
See “Emulex to acquire ServerEngines.”
The bet, and the acquisition, seem to have paid off. Emulex has racked up a number of OEM design wins for its 10GbE/FCoE/iSCSI converged network adapters (CNAs), most notably with HP. This puts Emulex at the table with Intel and Broadcom (which it beat out for the HP business) and may strengthen its position vs. QLogic and Brocade. In addition to HP, Emulex has design wins with vendors such as Dell, EMC, HDS, HP, IBM and NetApp.
ServerEngines was founded in 2004 by former Broadcom engineers that were previously with ServerWorks, which was acquired by Broadcom in 2001. In early 2009, Broadcom launched an unsuccessful hostile takeover of Emulex.
#5: DELL – OCARINA
Rumored to be in the $150 million ballpark, Dell’s acquisition of Ocarina came as a surprise to almost everybody. And this one (along with #4, see below) confirmed that storage optimization (data deduplication and/or compression) of primary storage is The Next Big Thing.
According to my original blog post on this acquisition (see “Dell to acquire Ocarina for data deduplication”): “Until the announcement of its embeddable, OEM version of its software, Ocarina was known primarily as a vendor of data reduction technology for primary storage. But the embeddable version is applicable across the storage spectrum, from primary storage to backup and archive.”
That led some analysts to predict that Dell is pursuing a one-size-fits-all approach to data deduplication where Ocarina’s technology will be used across the storage spectrum. If true, that would be bad news for Dell dedupe partners Symantec, CommVault and maybe even EMC Data Domain. But I don’t think that’s Dell’s game plan, at least not for the foreseeable future.
I think Dell will initially leverage Ocarina’s technology in specific image-intensive, fixed-content applications, and only on primary storage. That space is where, so far, Ocarina has made its mark, with large wins at companies such as Kodak. Dell will continue to use Symantec, CommVault and Data Domain where those companies’ technologies make more sense, or where customers demand it.
Besides, the Ocarina technology could be used in conjunction with deduplication technology from vendors such as Symantec and CommVault.
And in a related Top 10 acquisition . . .
#4: IBM – STORWIZE
This one had been rumored for weeks before IBM made it official, so it ranks low on the surprise factor but high on the industry influence scale. Even more than the Dell-Ocarina deal, and even more than NetApp’s evangelizing, IBM’s acquisition of data compression specialist Storwize put data reduction for primary storage in the #1 spot among Hot Storage Technologies.
Rumors put this deal in the range of $140 million.
IBM didn’t lay out specific plans, and it already has some good data reduction technology, but it looks like Big Blue will apply the Storwize technology to its high-end XIV system, Scale-Out Network Attached Storage (SONAS) platform, System Storage Easy Tier, and maybe even its ProtecTIER deduplication products.
Storwize’s data reduction technology differs from some of its competitors in that it is in-line, real-time compression, as opposed to data deduplication.
It’s certainly not an understatement to say that being acquired by IBM was the smartest thing Storwize did since changing its name from Storwiz.
Read the full story on InfoStor partner site Enterprise Storage Forum: “IBM to Buy Storwize for Real-Time Data Compression.” And check out Kevin Komiega’s blog post: “IBM to Acquire Storwize.”
#3: VISION SOLUTIONS – DOUBLE-TAKE
This one ranked high on the surprise factor (because Vision Solutions isn’t exactly well-known in the storage community) and it also ranked high on dollars, being valued at $242 million. Those two factors earned it the #2 ranking, although IBM-Storwize and Dell-Ocarina may be more interesting and certainly got a lot more ink.
The $242 million amounted to about $10.55 per Double-Take share. Double-Take went public in 2006 at about $11 a share.
Prior to the Vision Solutions announcement, it was well known that Double-Take was on the block, but the smart money was on vendors such as Dell and HP as potential acquirers.
Vision Solutions specializes in data protection software for IBM systems, while Double-Take’s strengths are in backup, replication, disaster recovery and high availability software, primarily for Microsoft platforms.
See “Vision Solutions to acquire Double-Take”
#2: EMC – GREENPLUM
I never did find out exactly what EMC paid for Greenplum, a data warehousing and analytics specialist, but my (questionable) sources tell me that the acquisition payment would easily put the deal near the top of this list. And besides, what would a Top 10 Storage Acquisitions list be without an EMC entry?
Greenplum claims more than 100 customers, including NASDAQ OMX, NYSE Euronext, Skype, Equifax and T-Mobile.
In addition to its massively parallel processing (MPP) Greenplum Database, the company has Greenplum Chorus, a cloud platform for collaboration and data sharing. Greenplum will become the foundation of a new division within EMC’s Information Infrastructure business.
So it’s a nice fit with EMC’s private cloud initiatives, but it also roughens up the competition between EMC, Oracle, IBM and Sun. Do you have a feeling that there’s at least one more big – very big – acquisition on the way?
See “EMC acquires data warehousing vendor Greenplum.”
#1: DELL -- 3PAR
At approximately $1.15 billion, Dell's planned acquisition of 3PAR is in the same ballpark as EMC's acquisition of Data Domain last year, both of which qualify as game changers.
Dell has commenced a tender offer to acquire all outstanding shares of 3PAR stock for $18 a share, or about an 86% permium over 3PAR's closing price on Friday.
That hefty price tag suggests that there were other bidders for 3PAR. And if anyone doubted that Dell wants to be a real (as opposed to reseller) player in the storage space, the 3PAR acquisition should assuage those doubts.
This announcement will probably once again call into question Dell's reseller partnership with EMC, but I don't see why. The Dell-EMC marriage will run its course one way or the other, but the outcome won't have anything to do with the 3PAR deal.
However, when you look at all of Dell's storage acquisitions (3PAR, Ocarina, EqualLogic, Exanet, Scalent and probably more to come), Dell and EMC could be on an accelerated path to splitsville. (Reportedly, Dell says that there is only about a 20% overlap between the 3PAR and Dell/EMC product lines.)
Historically, the summer months have been ripe for storage acquisitions so, given the prevailing climate, fasten your seatbelts. I may have to update this Top 10 list within the next two weeks.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
EMC to buy Greenplum for “big data” private clouds
July 6, 2010 – EMC announced today that it plans to acquire Greenplum for an undisclosed amount of cash. The deal is expected to close by September.
For the news story, see “EMC acquires data warehousing vendor Greenplum.”
I had never heard of Greenplum, but after a quick look at their site I gleaned that the company is a data warehouse and analytics vendor. However, EMC wasn’t about to lose an opportunity to fly the cloud flag in its press release on the acquisition announcement, according to which: Greenplum’s “disruptive data warehousing technology [is] a key enabler of “big data” clouds and self-service analytics.” That’s almost poetic.
EMC branching out beyond its storage-centric roots is, of course, nothing new. And the Greenplum acquisition seems to make more sense than the Documentum and RSA acquisitions originally did, although it may not be quite as impressive as the VMware and Data Domain acquisitions are proving to be.
Greenplum has a shared-nothing, massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture for data warehousing and analytical processing, delivered on a virtualized x86 infrastructure (unlike, oh, Oracle’s Exadata).
EMC plans to meld Greenplum’s architecture with its own private cloud vision/architecture. After the acquisition, Greenplum will become part of a new Data Computing Product Division at EMC.
On the surface, this just looks like a solid acquisition at what I assume to be a good price. But to get an idea of what EMC is really up to here, read Chuck Hollis’ blog: “EMC to Acquire Greenplum.”
Noting that the Greenplum architecture is based on a virtualized x86 infrastructure, Chuck notes that: “All of EMC’s storage products are x86 based – this creates a potential pathway where data intensive functions could be run closer to the information, freeing the compute farm to do what it does best.”
“The vast majority of these data warehouses contain sensitive information and produce analysis that is either confidential or otherwise privileged. Think information security and data loss prevention, for example.”
“Much of the higher-order analysis produces rich content that frequently drives a collaborative workflow among knowledge workers. Think about EMC’s assets in content management, collaborative workflows and case management.”
“And . . . let’s not forget the seductive appeal of running on-demand business analytics as yet another fully virtualized workload using dynamic resources in a private cloud model. Like running on a good-sized Vblock, for example.”
Is this a competitive reaction to Oracle? No, according to Hollis. And it won’t disrupt EMC’s relationships with vendors such as Sybase, SAP, Microsoft and ParAccell (Greenplum competitors, as are vendors such as Netezza and Teradata).
It’s impossible to opine about the sagacity of an acquisition if you don’t know how much a company paid, but I’m guessing that EMC (NYSE:EMC) got a good deal here. And it gives them a great opportunity to demonstrate unique use cases for their private cloud vision, not to mention the opportunity to sell a lot of hardware because the data warehouses that Greenplum plays in are measured in petabytes.
Greenplum customers include NASDAQ OMX, NYSE Euronext, Skype, Equifax and T-Mobile.
For the news story, see “EMC acquires data warehousing vendor Greenplum.”
I had never heard of Greenplum, but after a quick look at their site I gleaned that the company is a data warehouse and analytics vendor. However, EMC wasn’t about to lose an opportunity to fly the cloud flag in its press release on the acquisition announcement, according to which: Greenplum’s “disruptive data warehousing technology [is] a key enabler of “big data” clouds and self-service analytics.” That’s almost poetic.
EMC branching out beyond its storage-centric roots is, of course, nothing new. And the Greenplum acquisition seems to make more sense than the Documentum and RSA acquisitions originally did, although it may not be quite as impressive as the VMware and Data Domain acquisitions are proving to be.
Greenplum has a shared-nothing, massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture for data warehousing and analytical processing, delivered on a virtualized x86 infrastructure (unlike, oh, Oracle’s Exadata).
EMC plans to meld Greenplum’s architecture with its own private cloud vision/architecture. After the acquisition, Greenplum will become part of a new Data Computing Product Division at EMC.
On the surface, this just looks like a solid acquisition at what I assume to be a good price. But to get an idea of what EMC is really up to here, read Chuck Hollis’ blog: “EMC to Acquire Greenplum.”
Noting that the Greenplum architecture is based on a virtualized x86 infrastructure, Chuck notes that: “All of EMC’s storage products are x86 based – this creates a potential pathway where data intensive functions could be run closer to the information, freeing the compute farm to do what it does best.”
“The vast majority of these data warehouses contain sensitive information and produce analysis that is either confidential or otherwise privileged. Think information security and data loss prevention, for example.”
“Much of the higher-order analysis produces rich content that frequently drives a collaborative workflow among knowledge workers. Think about EMC’s assets in content management, collaborative workflows and case management.”
“And . . . let’s not forget the seductive appeal of running on-demand business analytics as yet another fully virtualized workload using dynamic resources in a private cloud model. Like running on a good-sized Vblock, for example.”
Is this a competitive reaction to Oracle? No, according to Hollis. And it won’t disrupt EMC’s relationships with vendors such as Sybase, SAP, Microsoft and ParAccell (Greenplum competitors, as are vendors such as Netezza and Teradata).
It’s impossible to opine about the sagacity of an acquisition if you don’t know how much a company paid, but I’m guessing that EMC (NYSE:EMC) got a good deal here. And it gives them a great opportunity to demonstrate unique use cases for their private cloud vision, not to mention the opportunity to sell a lot of hardware because the data warehouses that Greenplum plays in are measured in petabytes.
Greenplum customers include NASDAQ OMX, NYSE Euronext, Skype, Equifax and T-Mobile.
Friday, July 2, 2010
EMC pulls the plug on Atmos Online
July 2, 2010 – EMC has shuttered its Atmos Online cloud storage service, at least as a commercial service for end users. The company is shifting the technology to its Atmos-based cloud storage service provider partners, which currently include AT&T, Hosted Solutions and Peer 1 Hosting.
And I’m sure there will be many more now that partners won’t have to compete directly with EMC.
On its Atmos Online site, EMC directed customers to its Atmos cloud service provider partners.
Going forward, Atmos Online will be available strictly as a development environment, rather than a paid subscription service.
In my POV, Atmos Online was always a POC anyway.
It was a proof-of-concept designed to lure services providers at a time when the cloud storage concept was still a bit sketchy (although some would argue that it’s still sketchy). Atmos Online was launched a little more than a year ago.
The losers in this announcement are existing customers of Atmos Online (although it’s unclear how many of those there actually were), who will have to shift to one of EMC’s partner’s services or migrate to a non-Atmos cloud storage service.
The winners, of course, are EMC’s Atmos cloud storage partners, which no longer have to compete with EMC. Likewise, EMC no longer has to compete with those partners. It’s a win-win on that front. In fact, on its Atmos web site, EMC is “strongly encouraging” its existing Atmos customers to migrate to one of its partners.
Atmos Online as a commercial service for end users apparently never gained enough ground for EMC to justify the costs associated with hosted services. There’s more money in selling the technology and equipment to third-party providers that, at least in the case of AT&T, are better equipped to handle -- and make money from -- public cloud storage services. (One of EMC’s other partners – Hosted Solutions – launched its Atmos-based Stratus Cloud Storage service last month, which is based on TwinStrata’s CloudArray technology.)
Besides, Atmos Online wasn’t EMC’s only cloud storage play for consumers; the company still has Mozy and online storage services provider Iomega.
The shuttering of Atmos Online should be seen not as a failure on the part of EMC but, rather, as another prescient and tactical move by the company.
And I’m sure there will be many more now that partners won’t have to compete directly with EMC.
On its Atmos Online site, EMC directed customers to its Atmos cloud service provider partners.
Going forward, Atmos Online will be available strictly as a development environment, rather than a paid subscription service.
In my POV, Atmos Online was always a POC anyway.
It was a proof-of-concept designed to lure services providers at a time when the cloud storage concept was still a bit sketchy (although some would argue that it’s still sketchy). Atmos Online was launched a little more than a year ago.
The losers in this announcement are existing customers of Atmos Online (although it’s unclear how many of those there actually were), who will have to shift to one of EMC’s partner’s services or migrate to a non-Atmos cloud storage service.
The winners, of course, are EMC’s Atmos cloud storage partners, which no longer have to compete with EMC. Likewise, EMC no longer has to compete with those partners. It’s a win-win on that front. In fact, on its Atmos web site, EMC is “strongly encouraging” its existing Atmos customers to migrate to one of its partners.
Atmos Online as a commercial service for end users apparently never gained enough ground for EMC to justify the costs associated with hosted services. There’s more money in selling the technology and equipment to third-party providers that, at least in the case of AT&T, are better equipped to handle -- and make money from -- public cloud storage services. (One of EMC’s other partners – Hosted Solutions – launched its Atmos-based Stratus Cloud Storage service last month, which is based on TwinStrata’s CloudArray technology.)
Besides, Atmos Online wasn’t EMC’s only cloud storage play for consumers; the company still has Mozy and online storage services provider Iomega.
The shuttering of Atmos Online should be seen not as a failure on the part of EMC but, rather, as another prescient and tactical move by the company.
Friday, March 12, 2010
And the top 5 storage software vendors are . . .
March 12, 2010 – In yet another sign that a rebound is underway in the storage market (albeit a painfully slow one), the storage software market posted a slight increase in revenues in the fourth quarter of last year compared to Q4 2008 -- $3.094 billion vs. $3.079 billion, or a 0.5% increase. Q4 revenues were up 6.3% over Q3 (although Q4 numbers are almost always better than Q3).
That’s according to IDC’s recently released Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker report.
In the fourth quarter of 2009, EMC retained its top dog status with $734 million in storage software revenues and a commanding 23.7% market share, followed by Symantec (17.5%), IBM (13.2%), NetApp (7.9%), and HP (3.9%) and CA (3.8%) in a virtual dead heat for the #5 spot.
The only thing I found surprising here was NetApp’s strong showing. In fact, NetApp posted the greatest revenue gain from Q4 2008 to Q4 2009 – 7.9%. That increased the gap between NetApp and HP, which experienced a 12.1% decline in revenues from Q408 to Q409.
Looking at the full year, the picture doesn’t change much, although HP drops out of the top 5 list. On 2009 revenues of almost $2.7 billion, EMC was #1 with a market share of 22.7% (down from 24.4% in 2008), followed by Symantec (17.9%), IBM (13.5%), NetApp (8.0%) and CA (4.0%).
Under the storage software umbrella, IDC includes the following product categories: data protection and recovery, archiving, replication, storage management, device management, storage infrastructure, file systems, and “other.”
Related blog post:
Who are the top 5 array vendors?
IDC press releases:
“Storage Software Market Has Typical Fourth Quarter Jump, as Well as a Slight Increase from Last Year”
“Total Disk Storage Systems Turn a Corner, Posting First Year-Over-Year Gain in More Than Four Quarters”
That’s according to IDC’s recently released Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker report.
In the fourth quarter of 2009, EMC retained its top dog status with $734 million in storage software revenues and a commanding 23.7% market share, followed by Symantec (17.5%), IBM (13.2%), NetApp (7.9%), and HP (3.9%) and CA (3.8%) in a virtual dead heat for the #5 spot.
The only thing I found surprising here was NetApp’s strong showing. In fact, NetApp posted the greatest revenue gain from Q4 2008 to Q4 2009 – 7.9%. That increased the gap between NetApp and HP, which experienced a 12.1% decline in revenues from Q408 to Q409.
Looking at the full year, the picture doesn’t change much, although HP drops out of the top 5 list. On 2009 revenues of almost $2.7 billion, EMC was #1 with a market share of 22.7% (down from 24.4% in 2008), followed by Symantec (17.9%), IBM (13.5%), NetApp (8.0%) and CA (4.0%).
Under the storage software umbrella, IDC includes the following product categories: data protection and recovery, archiving, replication, storage management, device management, storage infrastructure, file systems, and “other.”
Related blog post:
Who are the top 5 array vendors?
IDC press releases:
“Storage Software Market Has Typical Fourth Quarter Jump, as Well as a Slight Increase from Last Year”
“Total Disk Storage Systems Turn a Corner, Posting First Year-Over-Year Gain in More Than Four Quarters”
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Who are the top 5 array vendors?
March 11, 2010 – Market researcher IDC recently released its Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker report, which provides revenue statistics for the external and internal disk array markets, as well as vendors’ market shares.
Although it’s no surprise that 2009 wasn’t the best year for disk array vendors, the market did end the year on a high note. Fourth quarter revenues for the total (external and internal disk systems) market accounted for almost 30% of the full year’s revenues, and represented the first year-over-year growth since the third quarter of 2008, according to Liz Conner, IDC’s senior research analyst, storage systems.
Q4 revenues were $7.273 billion, up slightly from $7.26 billion in Q4 2008. Total revenues for 2009 were almost $24.5 billion, compared to $27.8 billion in 2008.
There were no surprises on the leader board. Racking up 2009 revenues of $4.1 billion in the external disk systems market alone, EMC earned its 800-pound-gorilla epithet by being #1 by a long shot. EMC grabbed a 22.7% market share, trailed by IBM (14.2%), HP (11.7%), Dell (9.1%) and NetApp (8.6%).
Looking at the total (external plus internal) disk systems market, the numbers slide toward server vendors HP and IBM. With $4.5 billion in revenues, HP earned the #1 spot with an 18.4% market share, followed by IBM (16.9%), EMC (16.8%), Dell (11.4%) and NetApp (6.4%).
Those rankings were pretty much expected, but what struck me as weird was that there was virtually no change in those vendor’s market shares between 2008 and 2009. In each case, there was less than a 1% difference, despite all the high-stakes battling in this high-margin market.
When you slice the disk systems market into segments, there were a few mild surprises.
For example, EMC led the NAS market with a 50.5% share, followed by NetApp with a 20.2% share. I had no idea the gap between the two was that large, but NetApp must be making up for it in other areas (see “NetApp hit$ a home run” ). The NAS market grew a respectable 12.6% year-over-year, and now accounts for about 20% of the entire external disk storage systems market.
But if EMC and NetApp are hogging more than 70% of the NAS market, that doesn’t leave many scraps for the hordes of other NAS vendors.
The iSCSI SAN array market posted a very impressive 30% revenue growth in Q4 vs. the same period a year ago. Dell led the iSCSI market with a 31.5% slice of the revenues (maybe EqualLogic was worth $1.4 billion), followed by EMC with a 15.7% cut. Again, a little surprising because I would have guessed NetApp was in the #2 position.
You may have noticed that Hitachi Data Systems does not show up in the top five anything in the IDC report. That’s because IDC does not include OEM sales in its tracking. As such, HDS sales revenues do not reflect their OEM sales to HP, nor to Sun -- a partnership that’s set to expire on March 31.
See Kevin Komiega’s new story, Oracle-Sun ends HDS partnership
and my blog post, Who wins/loses in the Oracle-HDS breakup?
And you can read the full IDC press release here.
Although it’s no surprise that 2009 wasn’t the best year for disk array vendors, the market did end the year on a high note. Fourth quarter revenues for the total (external and internal disk systems) market accounted for almost 30% of the full year’s revenues, and represented the first year-over-year growth since the third quarter of 2008, according to Liz Conner, IDC’s senior research analyst, storage systems.
Q4 revenues were $7.273 billion, up slightly from $7.26 billion in Q4 2008. Total revenues for 2009 were almost $24.5 billion, compared to $27.8 billion in 2008.
There were no surprises on the leader board. Racking up 2009 revenues of $4.1 billion in the external disk systems market alone, EMC earned its 800-pound-gorilla epithet by being #1 by a long shot. EMC grabbed a 22.7% market share, trailed by IBM (14.2%), HP (11.7%), Dell (9.1%) and NetApp (8.6%).
Looking at the total (external plus internal) disk systems market, the numbers slide toward server vendors HP and IBM. With $4.5 billion in revenues, HP earned the #1 spot with an 18.4% market share, followed by IBM (16.9%), EMC (16.8%), Dell (11.4%) and NetApp (6.4%).
Those rankings were pretty much expected, but what struck me as weird was that there was virtually no change in those vendor’s market shares between 2008 and 2009. In each case, there was less than a 1% difference, despite all the high-stakes battling in this high-margin market.
When you slice the disk systems market into segments, there were a few mild surprises.
For example, EMC led the NAS market with a 50.5% share, followed by NetApp with a 20.2% share. I had no idea the gap between the two was that large, but NetApp must be making up for it in other areas (see “NetApp hit$ a home run” ). The NAS market grew a respectable 12.6% year-over-year, and now accounts for about 20% of the entire external disk storage systems market.
But if EMC and NetApp are hogging more than 70% of the NAS market, that doesn’t leave many scraps for the hordes of other NAS vendors.
The iSCSI SAN array market posted a very impressive 30% revenue growth in Q4 vs. the same period a year ago. Dell led the iSCSI market with a 31.5% slice of the revenues (maybe EqualLogic was worth $1.4 billion), followed by EMC with a 15.7% cut. Again, a little surprising because I would have guessed NetApp was in the #2 position.
You may have noticed that Hitachi Data Systems does not show up in the top five anything in the IDC report. That’s because IDC does not include OEM sales in its tracking. As such, HDS sales revenues do not reflect their OEM sales to HP, nor to Sun -- a partnership that’s set to expire on March 31.
See Kevin Komiega’s new story, Oracle-Sun ends HDS partnership
and my blog post, Who wins/loses in the Oracle-HDS breakup?
And you can read the full IDC press release here.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Users’ top storage technologies, vendors for 2010
January 25, 2010 – Results from a recent end-user survey conducted by TheInfoPro research firm included a few surprises regarding what technologies are “hot” and which vendors will be “winners” this year. TheInfoPro surveyed and interviewed storage professionals in the Fortune 1000 (F1000), as well as midsize enterprises (MSEs).
According to TheInfoPro’s Heat Index, which measures user demand for technologies -- as well as the relative size of market opportunities for vendors -- data deduplication and primary storage data reduction (or online data reduction) will top the needs of both F1000 companies and MSEs in 2010.
The data deduplication entry was predictable, but users’ prioritization of data reduction technologies for primary storage came as somewhat of a surprise to me.
Not for Anders Lofgren, TheInfoPro’s chief research officer. “It’s not surprising, because the emphasis is still on cost reduction. It’s all about managing capital costs on the hardware side and managing operating costs on the staffing side,” says Lofgren.
The list is growing, but early entrants in the online data reduction space include EMC and NetApp, as well as vendors such as Exar, greenBytes, and Storwize. (See “Consider data reduction for primary storage” ). In TheInfoPro survey, not surprisingly, EMC and NetApp were mentioned most frequently.
Also ranking high in the TheInfoPro’s Heat Index were the F1000’s planned use of solid-state disk (SSD) drives, 8Gbps Fibre Channel, and virtual server data management.
TheInfoPro’s Heat Indexes also indicate increased use of technologies such as thin provisioning, email archiving, information lifecycle management (ILM), storage resource management (SRM), automated tiering and provisioning, and backup management for virtual servers. Among SMEs, interest in block virtualization is picking up steam, and MSEs plan to expand their use of remote replication, 10GbE, and enterprise-class SAS drives.
Who are the “most exciting” storage vendors in 2010? Among MSEs, the top picks were somewhat surprising: Compellent, 3PAR and Hitachi Data Systems. The top three “in use” vendors were EMC, NetApp and Compellent.
Among Fortune 1000 firms, the most exciting storage vendors are EMC, NetApp and IBM. The InfoPro noted that:
--The acquisition of Data Domain boosted EMC’s data deduplication “in use” share in the Fortune 1000 from about 5% to 25%.
--In the F1000 space, EMC’s V-Max refresh rates appear to be driving the majority of SSD discussions. For example, SSD “in use” responses quadrupled from six months ago (albeit from a base of near zero).
--In email archiving, Symantec, EMC and IBM consistently placed at the top of end users’ lists. IBM’s “in use” activity in the F1000 grew the fastest, compared to TheInfoPro’s survey of six months ago, while both Symantec and CommVault also showed significant improvement.
Visit TheInfoPro’s site for more insights from the firms’ ongoing end-user surveys.
Related InfoStor post:
The top 5 storage technologies of 2009 (and 2010?)
According to TheInfoPro’s Heat Index, which measures user demand for technologies -- as well as the relative size of market opportunities for vendors -- data deduplication and primary storage data reduction (or online data reduction) will top the needs of both F1000 companies and MSEs in 2010.
The data deduplication entry was predictable, but users’ prioritization of data reduction technologies for primary storage came as somewhat of a surprise to me.
Not for Anders Lofgren, TheInfoPro’s chief research officer. “It’s not surprising, because the emphasis is still on cost reduction. It’s all about managing capital costs on the hardware side and managing operating costs on the staffing side,” says Lofgren.
The list is growing, but early entrants in the online data reduction space include EMC and NetApp, as well as vendors such as Exar, greenBytes, and Storwize. (See “Consider data reduction for primary storage” ). In TheInfoPro survey, not surprisingly, EMC and NetApp were mentioned most frequently.
Also ranking high in the TheInfoPro’s Heat Index were the F1000’s planned use of solid-state disk (SSD) drives, 8Gbps Fibre Channel, and virtual server data management.
TheInfoPro’s Heat Indexes also indicate increased use of technologies such as thin provisioning, email archiving, information lifecycle management (ILM), storage resource management (SRM), automated tiering and provisioning, and backup management for virtual servers. Among SMEs, interest in block virtualization is picking up steam, and MSEs plan to expand their use of remote replication, 10GbE, and enterprise-class SAS drives.
Who are the “most exciting” storage vendors in 2010? Among MSEs, the top picks were somewhat surprising: Compellent, 3PAR and Hitachi Data Systems. The top three “in use” vendors were EMC, NetApp and Compellent.
Among Fortune 1000 firms, the most exciting storage vendors are EMC, NetApp and IBM. The InfoPro noted that:
--The acquisition of Data Domain boosted EMC’s data deduplication “in use” share in the Fortune 1000 from about 5% to 25%.
--In the F1000 space, EMC’s V-Max refresh rates appear to be driving the majority of SSD discussions. For example, SSD “in use” responses quadrupled from six months ago (albeit from a base of near zero).
--In email archiving, Symantec, EMC and IBM consistently placed at the top of end users’ lists. IBM’s “in use” activity in the F1000 grew the fastest, compared to TheInfoPro’s survey of six months ago, while both Symantec and CommVault also showed significant improvement.
Visit TheInfoPro’s site for more insights from the firms’ ongoing end-user surveys.
Related InfoStor post:
The top 5 storage technologies of 2009 (and 2010?)
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Who are the (perceived) leaders in storage virtualization?
December 21, 2009 – IT Brand Pulse recently surveyed 146 IT professionals, asking them which vendors they perceived as leaders in storage virtualization. In addition to the overall leader, other categories included price, performance, reliability, service and support, and innovation.
IT Brand Pulse gave the survey participants 12 vendor choices in each category: 3PAR, DataCore, Dell, EMC, FalconStor, Hitachi, HP, IBM, LSI, NetApp, Symantec and VMware.
And the winners are . . .
EMC took top honors as the perceived leader in the overall storage virtualization market, and also took the top spot in the reliability and service/support categories, while placing second in the innovation and performance categories.
NetApp took the top spots in innovation and performance and, strangely enough, placed second in all other categories.
Not surprisingly, Dell was #1 in the price category and, surprisingly, was #3 in the market leader and performance categories.
VMware was #3 in price and innovation, while IBM placed third in reliability and service/support.
The other seven vendors each got less than 10% of the vote in all of the categories.
Here are the win, place, show vendors in each category, with the percentage of end-user votes they received.
Market leader: EMC (26%), NetApp (19.9%), Dell (12.3%)
Price: Dell (27.4%), NetApp (22.6%), VMware (17.1%)
Performance: NetApp (24.7%), EMC (21.2%), Dell (11%)
Reliability: EMC (28.1%), NetApp (15.8%), IBM (12.3%)
Service and support: EMC (28.8%), NetApp (19.9%), IBM (11.6%)
Innovation: NetApp (25.3%), EMC (21.9%), VMware (11%)
Frank Berry, IT Brand Pulse’s CEO and senior analyst – and infostor.com’s newest blogger – recently blogged about storage virtualization. I like his lead:
“They say humans recognize the smell of chili, but dogs can detect the smell of different spices in the chili. Similarly, humans recognize storage virtualization, but industry experts see clear distinctions between the different types of storage virtualization.”
Frank goes on to outline the first two phases of storage virtualization, and provides a glimpse into the emerging third phase (heterogeneous storage virtualization in the cloud). And he also gives his view on which vendor was first to market with storage virtualization. Hint: It was in 1970.
Read Frank’s blog here.
IT Brand Pulse gave the survey participants 12 vendor choices in each category: 3PAR, DataCore, Dell, EMC, FalconStor, Hitachi, HP, IBM, LSI, NetApp, Symantec and VMware.
And the winners are . . .
EMC took top honors as the perceived leader in the overall storage virtualization market, and also took the top spot in the reliability and service/support categories, while placing second in the innovation and performance categories.
NetApp took the top spots in innovation and performance and, strangely enough, placed second in all other categories.
Not surprisingly, Dell was #1 in the price category and, surprisingly, was #3 in the market leader and performance categories.
VMware was #3 in price and innovation, while IBM placed third in reliability and service/support.
The other seven vendors each got less than 10% of the vote in all of the categories.
Here are the win, place, show vendors in each category, with the percentage of end-user votes they received.
Market leader: EMC (26%), NetApp (19.9%), Dell (12.3%)
Price: Dell (27.4%), NetApp (22.6%), VMware (17.1%)
Performance: NetApp (24.7%), EMC (21.2%), Dell (11%)
Reliability: EMC (28.1%), NetApp (15.8%), IBM (12.3%)
Service and support: EMC (28.8%), NetApp (19.9%), IBM (11.6%)
Innovation: NetApp (25.3%), EMC (21.9%), VMware (11%)
Frank Berry, IT Brand Pulse’s CEO and senior analyst – and infostor.com’s newest blogger – recently blogged about storage virtualization. I like his lead:
“They say humans recognize the smell of chili, but dogs can detect the smell of different spices in the chili. Similarly, humans recognize storage virtualization, but industry experts see clear distinctions between the different types of storage virtualization.”
Frank goes on to outline the first two phases of storage virtualization, and provides a glimpse into the emerging third phase (heterogeneous storage virtualization in the cloud). And he also gives his view on which vendor was first to market with storage virtualization. Hint: It was in 1970.
Read Frank’s blog here.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
VMware and Cisco and EMC, oh my
September 1, 2009 – There’s a rumor swirling at this week’s VMworld show regarding the imminent announcement of a deep, formal partnership between VMware, Cisco and EMC (aka VCE).
The troika already has a loose relationship, but scuttlebutt suggests a much more formidable triumvirate. The announcement might come at VMworld this week, although next week may be more likely.
Paul Mansky, a principal in equity research, data center infrastructure, at CANACCORD Adams, issued a note this week that hints at what the three-way relationship might entail.
Citing industry sources, Mansky says the deal will revolve around Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) platform and, of course, EMC storage systems (with an emphasis on Atmos?) and VMware in bundled configurations that address cloud computing (internal or external) environments. The venture is also expected to include joint testing and marketing, as well as a road show in September or October.
Interestingly, sources also say that EMC plans to compensate both EMC and Cisco field reps for 100% of the value of the combined solution sale.
If anybody doubted whether Cisco’s UCS would gain traction, this deal would put those notions to rest.
The troika already has a loose relationship, but scuttlebutt suggests a much more formidable triumvirate. The announcement might come at VMworld this week, although next week may be more likely.
Paul Mansky, a principal in equity research, data center infrastructure, at CANACCORD Adams, issued a note this week that hints at what the three-way relationship might entail.
Citing industry sources, Mansky says the deal will revolve around Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) platform and, of course, EMC storage systems (with an emphasis on Atmos?) and VMware in bundled configurations that address cloud computing (internal or external) environments. The venture is also expected to include joint testing and marketing, as well as a road show in September or October.
Interestingly, sources also say that EMC plans to compensate both EMC and Cisco field reps for 100% of the value of the combined solution sale.
If anybody doubted whether Cisco’s UCS would gain traction, this deal would put those notions to rest.
Monday, July 13, 2009
EMC out-trumps NetApp, or not
July 13, 2009 – Now that the bidding battle for Data Domain is over, with EMC set to lay out a whopping $2.1 billion, the question is: What’s next?
To get the opinions of analysts such as the Enterprise Strategy Group’s Steve Duplessie and Wikibon.org’s Dave Vellante, check out senior editor Kevin Komiega’s blog post, “Is Data Domain a good fit for EMC?”
I draw two conclusions from this saga:
--EMC paid way too much
--NetApp did the right thing
I thought the original bid of $1.5 billion was too high, but $2.1 billion for a data deduplication vendor?? With some vendors giving away deduplication for free (most notably, EMC and NetApp) users’ expectations re the cost of deduplication are going down. I’m told that a Data Domain implementation can get real costly real quickly, but even EMC won’t be able to keep those margins up over the long run. As such, EMC’s ROI for Data Domain appears questionable. And that’s a lot of money to pay just to keep a technology out of a competitor’s hands. EMC may appear to be victorious, but it’s a Pyrrhic victory at best.
NetApp officials did the right thing by ditching their egos and walking away from the bidding war. In fact, you could almost argue that NetApp is the victor in this battle.
So what’s next for NetApp? The conventional wisdom is that the company must make acquisitions – particularly on the software front – to round out its IT stack and stay competitive with EMC, IBM, HP, etc. And if you cruise the blogs you’ll find that acquisition speculation tends to focus on vendors such as CommVault, FalconStor, etc. and primary storage optimization vendors such as Ocarina. That assumes that NetApp is as dizzy over dedupe as it appears to be.
My guess is that NetApp will resume its acquisition attempts, but not in the deduplication arena. I think we’re in for some more surprises, and probably in the near future.
And in unrelated news . . .
Also last week, Broadcom appears to have dropped its hostile takeover bid for Emulex after getting rebuffed yet again on its sweetened offer. Something tells me this one isn’t over yet. Broadcom needs Fibre Channel – or at least Fibre Channel over Ethernet – technology, and Emulex isn’t the only Fibre Channel expert in the OC.
To get the opinions of analysts such as the Enterprise Strategy Group’s Steve Duplessie and Wikibon.org’s Dave Vellante, check out senior editor Kevin Komiega’s blog post, “Is Data Domain a good fit for EMC?”
I draw two conclusions from this saga:
--EMC paid way too much
--NetApp did the right thing
I thought the original bid of $1.5 billion was too high, but $2.1 billion for a data deduplication vendor?? With some vendors giving away deduplication for free (most notably, EMC and NetApp) users’ expectations re the cost of deduplication are going down. I’m told that a Data Domain implementation can get real costly real quickly, but even EMC won’t be able to keep those margins up over the long run. As such, EMC’s ROI for Data Domain appears questionable. And that’s a lot of money to pay just to keep a technology out of a competitor’s hands. EMC may appear to be victorious, but it’s a Pyrrhic victory at best.
NetApp officials did the right thing by ditching their egos and walking away from the bidding war. In fact, you could almost argue that NetApp is the victor in this battle.
So what’s next for NetApp? The conventional wisdom is that the company must make acquisitions – particularly on the software front – to round out its IT stack and stay competitive with EMC, IBM, HP, etc. And if you cruise the blogs you’ll find that acquisition speculation tends to focus on vendors such as CommVault, FalconStor, etc. and primary storage optimization vendors such as Ocarina. That assumes that NetApp is as dizzy over dedupe as it appears to be.
My guess is that NetApp will resume its acquisition attempts, but not in the deduplication arena. I think we’re in for some more surprises, and probably in the near future.
And in unrelated news . . .
Also last week, Broadcom appears to have dropped its hostile takeover bid for Emulex after getting rebuffed yet again on its sweetened offer. Something tells me this one isn’t over yet. Broadcom needs Fibre Channel – or at least Fibre Channel over Ethernet – technology, and Emulex isn’t the only Fibre Channel expert in the OC.
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