Global enterprise external OEM storage systems market revenue grows by a mere 1.3 percent for the third quarter, IDC reveals

According to IDC Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker, global spending on enterprise external OEM storage systems grew 1.3 percent year over year to US$6.6 billion during the third quarter of this year. 

Total external OEM storage capacity shipments were up 6.8 percent year over year to 17.3 exabytes during the quarter. Revenue generated by the group of original design manufacturers (ODMs) selling directly to hyperscale data centers declined 6.8 percent year over year in the thrid quarter this year to $5.8 billion. 

Total market capacity shipments (External OEM + ODM Direct + Server-Based Storage) declined 13.9 percent to 98.8 exabytes.

Dell Technologies was the largest enterprise external OEM storage systems supplier during the quarter, accounting for 31.5 percent of global revenue. NetApp and HPE/New H3C Group tied for second with 9.9 percent and 9.6 percent of the market, respectively. 

Huawei, Hitachi, and IBM tied for the fourth position with revenue shares of 7.0 percent, 6.2 percent and 6.0 percent, respectively. Despite growing and gaining market share during the third quarter, Pure Storage and Lenovo did not finish among the top 5 companies. 

The total All Flash Array (AFA) market generated $2.58 billion in revenue during the quarter, up 11.7 percent year over year. The Hybrid Flash Array (HFA) market was worth slightly less than $2.54 billion in revenue, down 1.7 percent from the third quarter last year. 

On a geographic basis, Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) grew the fastest of any region, up 12.5 percent year over year. Japan grew 2.5 percent; Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) was down 1.0 percent; and the Americas declined 2.7 percent. China as a standalone country grew 20.4 percent year over year in the third quarter this year.

KIOXIA’s KumoScale software offers cross-domain volume replication; boosts data protection with disaggregated NVMe flash storage

KIOXIA America Inc. (formerly Toshiba Memory America), announced that the v3.11 of its KumoScale storage software with NVM Express over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) now includes cross-domain volume replication. With this new feature, KumoScale offers data protection at the storage layer while maintaining NVMe flash performance and low latency.

KIOXIA’s KumoScale storage software makes flash storage accessible over a data center network – allowing data centers to run more efficiently. To address the inefficiencies associated with direct-attached storage (DAS) architectures, KumoScale software disaggregates high-performance NVMe SSDs from compute nodes and shares them across a network infrastructure as network-attached resources.

KumoScale software is a high-performance block storage software suite for on-premise clouds. Combining the speed and responsiveness of born-in-the-cloud software with the staying power of one of the world's largest flash memory makers, KumoScale software uses NVMe technology to enable “flash-as–a-service."

Many databases and applications require their storage systems to provide resilience against drive failure and across arbitrary failure domains. These domains can include racks, aisles – or entire data centers. KumoScale software’s cross-domain replication makes data protection available and easy to flexibly deploy.

KumoScale software’s data center-level approach to resilience against drive failure or network partition allows users to specify arbitrary failure domains using tags. When provisioning volumes, KumoScale software will create volume replicas across multiple KumoScale appliances located in different failure domains for rack-level resiliency. This addresses both equipment failure and maintenance downtime scenarios, and can be provided to only those applications or storage classes that require it.

KIOXIA designed KumoScale software to deliver NVMe flash as a service – enabling cost-effective, networked flash performance close to that of local (in-server) NVMe SSDs.

“Cloud-native applications typically offer data protection by replicating shards at the database layer,” noted Joel Dedrick, vice president and general manager, networked storage software, KIOXIA America, Inc. “However, in our experience, few customers are 100% cloud native – there are always a few legacy applications that depend on the storage layer to provide data protection. KumoScale software’s cross-domain volume replication is designed to provide the flexibility to protect data for entrenched applications while not forcing a one-size-fits-all solution across a company’s workloads.”

NetApp Keystone program delivers simplified cloud participation for enterprise, both on and off the premises

NetApp announced on Tuesday NetApp Keystone, a program that offers a range of flexible solutions for customers whether they choose to build or buy their cloud infrastructure.

Organizations are digitally transforming to drive competitive advantage. They need to accelerate innovation in today’s real-time world while dealing with the complex reality that data and resources live anywhere and everywhere.

In order to address this complexity, IT environments must transform. While the industry has been focused on addressing these needs from a technology standpoint, the incremental improvements to financial options and to the upgrade process haven’t kept pace, until now.

NetApp Keystone is a program that offers a range of flexible solutions for customers, whether they choose to build or buy their cloud infrastructure, on their premises or off. Keystone offers the agility, pay-per-use economics, dynamic scaling, and operational simplicity that customers need to be able to consume cloud on their own terms.

Keystone features flexibility to mix and match purchases and subscription payment methods; ability to run any NetApp service in any environment—on premises, cloud, and hybrid; freedom to choose how it’s all managed—by NetApp, a partner, or internally; and simplified ownership experience that makes it easier to buy, operate and grow starting with NetApp’s new systems, the A400, FAS8300 and FAS8700.

Keystone is designed to meet the reality of a hybrid multicloud world where IT teams need to have greater choice, flexibility, and freedom to run and pay for their data services however they want.

NetApp aims to simplify the business of data services for customers from every perspective: from how they buy and consume products and services to how they run them in their environments and who services them. 

Along with the new program and simplified customer experience, NetApp announced a number of updates throughout its portfolio, with a range of new product launches, enhancements, and integrations.

The integrated solution with Active IQ and Cloud Insights offer access to NetApp’s exponentially growing data lake of IT infrastructure intelligence for real-time, one-click resolution of issues across an entire hybrid multi-cloud environment. New data services provide security and compliance for various industries, including federal, defense, and critical infrastructure, in addition to enterprise-class protection and tiering of cloud data, regardless of the choice of cloud.

The offering also delivers flash storage systems and solutions and NetApp ONTAP updates offer a range of performance options, simplicity to power enterprise and modern applications. Additionally, the AFF All SAN array delivers resiliency and record-setting performance in the midrange.

Leveraging Kubernetes, NetApp has created a redesigned model to allow true application portability and answer the economic factors and complexity concerns that have begun to plague modern DevOps. Based on NetApp’s own transformation, which connected the dots between three disparate solutions being used internally, it provides the template for anyone to avoid vendor lock-in, lift and shift entire infrastructures, with the flexibility around anywhere workloads live.

New Virtium StorFly industrial SSDs come with I-Temp support, shock/vibration tolerance, integrated data protection

Virtium announced on Tuesday that it has doubled the capacity of its StorFly 2.5-inch line of SATA industrial SSDs. Now with a top-capacity of four terabytes (4TB), the drives are ideal for large file-write applications such as security/surveillance and data logging, as well as demanding file-content uses such as 3D mapping and databases in growing demand in the transportation, IIoT, edge computing, and military/aerospace markets.

The new, double-capacity Virtium StorFly industrial SSDs are among the first 4TB 2.5-inch SATA SSDs on the market. The drives are also among the few of that capacity that also feature industrial temperature (I-Temp) support, high shock/vibration tolerance and integrated data protection. Moreover, the 2.5-inch SSDs are designed around triple-level-cell (TLC) 3D NAND flash that yields higher densities at a lower cost per bit. They use the SATA interface for maximum compatibility, and feature a low operating power of 3.4W.

The new, higher-capacity drives’ 2.5-inch form factor enables them to be deployed in standard storage enclosures/racks and to quickly replace older SSDs with lower capacities and/or that are less tolerant of extreme temperature, shock and vibration. 

As with all StorFly industrial SSDs, these new 4TB drives are supported by a suite of tools providing additional data protection and solid-state storage monitoring. These software modules provide users the ability to optimize, protect, manage and qualify SSDs. Additionally, the new StorFly drives feature an integrated AES-256 encryption engine with on-the-fly encryption to protect data at rest, as well as secure-erase capabilities.

Virtium StorFly SSDs use one of the market’s only NAND manufacturer-endorsed industrial-temperature 3D flash storage. This is in contrast to other, previously introduced industrial-temperature 3D NAND that lack manufacturers’ endorsement, posing the risk of longer-term reliability issues. 

With I-Temp support, the drives are designed to operate reliably in extreme temperatures that are typical across the embedded-systems landscape.