appICU

Woody Hutsell, AppICU

Flash back one year ago.  I was working at Fusion-io on a software defined storage solution with some of the brightest minds in the industry.  Fusion-io was flying high reaching over $100 million in quarterly revenue.  David Flynn, Rick White, Jim Dawson were leading one of the most talented teams I have been around.  There are still really talented people at Fusion-io, but take away Rick White (heart), David Flynn (mind) and Jim Dawson (soul) and you have just another company.  A company still bringing in some real revenue by the way and continuing to dominate in PCI Flash.  Their relationship with my employer, IBM, is still strong.  If I were buying PCI Flash for Intel servers, they would still be my first choice.

I left Fusion-io at the end of March to go back home, literally and figuratively.  I loved working at Fusion-io, but traveling from my home in Houston to Salt Lake City/San Jose twice per month was not great fun.  More importantly, IBM had closed its acquisition of Texas Memory Systems and my friends, co-workers and family were encouraging me to come back.  The idea of being with a company of IBM’s capability, picking up where I left off with my first solid state storage baby (the RamSan), and working with friends and family less than two miles from home was too much to pass up.  I could feel the excitement from the TMSers who were now IBMers and saw that IBM was out to win in the all flash array category.  Did someone say a billion dollar investment in flash?  Makes the $150 million for Pure Storage look like pocket change.

My initial conversations with the IBM team, pre-joining, validated this feeling I was getting.   IBM had brought the best and was basing many of them in Houston.  As important to me, was seeing that many of the other talented people who had left TMS in the years prior to the acquisition were returning including friends who had great roles at Oracle and HP.

If history has taught us anything related to the solid state storage industry, the fate of companies rises and falls on the strength of their relationships with the big companies in the industry.  STEC made the first big splash locking up OEM deals for Zeus-IOPS.  Fusion-io made the next big splash in the PCI Flash space locking up OEM deals for ioDrives and ioScale.  Violin had their first big peak on the back of a short-lived relationship with HP.  All of these company’s fortunes have surged, and at times collapsed, from these relationships.  It only made sense to me then that the one thing better than being OEM’d by the big company was being the big company; and so far I am right.

So here we are at the end of 2013.  I think 2013 will be seen as the year that the all flash array market finally took off generating the real revenues that have been anticipated for years.

2014 will witness the bifurcation of the all flash array market that Jeff Janukowicz at IDC first called out in a research report a couple of years ago creating real separation from products that are focused on “absolute performance” and those focused on the “enterprise.”  In some ways this is a bit like talking about the market that is and the market that could be.  Today, the majority of all flash array purchases in the enterprise are used for database acceleration (bare-metal or virtual). These workloads, more so than many others, especially benefit from absolute performance systems and notably do not benefit from inline data deduplication.  Curiously, the venture backed companies in the market are almost exclusively focused on the enterprise feature rich category.  Even Violin, who once had a credible offering in this category, has chosen an architectural path that moves them away from the absolute performance segment of the market.  The company with the most compelling solution in this category (in my clearly biased opinion) is IBM with its FlashSystem product.  I have for at least a decade heard the industry characterizing the RamSan and now the FlashSystem as the Ferrari of flash arrays. What our competitors have discovered along the way is that performance is the first cut at most customer sites and beyond that FlashSystem brings a much better economic solution because of its low latency, high density and low power consumption.

Does this mean IBM doesn’t have a play in the all-flash enterprise category?  Stay tuned.  It’s not 2014 yet.  In fact, mark your calendars for the years’ first big announcement webcast bit.ly/SCJanWebcast

And really, did you even think that thought.  IBM has the broadest flash portfolio in the industry.  IBM has clearly said that the market is approaching a tipping point, a point where the economic benefits of flash outweigh its higher cost.  This tipping point will lead to the all-flash data center.  And nobody understands the data center better than IBM.

I am looking forward to an eventful 2014.  Happy Holidays and Happy New Year.

Woody

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 18th, 2013 at 8:36 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.