DDN is a privately held company that focuses on delivering storage solutions for high-performance computing (HPC), media and analytics use cases. DDN’s strength in these market segments is highlighted by its OEM agreements with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Dell, Fujitsu, Atos, Cray, IBM and Lenovo, and are a reflection of the management team’s deep engineering roots. DDN’s hybrid storage product portfolio mainly consists of the SFA14K and the smaller SFA7K series. NAS and object storage functionality is provided by configuring the SFA7K and SFA12K systems as the back-end storage, namely the GRIDScaler and EXAScaler platforms. EXAScaler is built on the Lustre file system and positioned for HPC use cases, while GRIDScaler leverages IBM Spectrum Scale (based on GPFS) and is positioned for big data use cases. DDN also offers vertical-specific solutions, namely BIOScaler and MEDIAScaler for life sciences and media content production workflows, respectively. The Storage Fusion Xceleration (SFX) flash cache accelerates file system performance and supports multiple configurations depending on the pattern of reads and writes. DDN has its support and professional services teams present in all major geographies that help the vendor to respond to specific customer requirements adequately.

Dell’s acquisition of EMC is now more than a year old. While organization and personnel adjustments are still occurring, the new organization’s strategy for product rationalization is now in much clearer focus and can best be summarized as, “Do no harm while repositioning the company and its product portfolio.” This has translated into maintaining investments in Unity, VMAX, Isilon and SC (aka Compellent) series storage arrays, minimizing interseries competition and creating “better together” integrated infrastructure solutions that leverage heritage Dell-owned technologies without putting partner relationships at risk. Omitted from this list is the PS series, which is on the road to end of life.

Dell EMC is taking advantage of its status as a privately held company by prioritizing the creation of lease agreements that publicly traded companies have difficulty in countering, the development of indirect channel-centric marketing and sales programs, and maintaining an image of technology leadership over other key performance indicators, such as individual transaction profitability and R&D to revenue ratios. Much of Dell EMC’s sales success in the EMC installed base is attributable to its success in upgrading its installed base with Unity, VMAX and Isilon arrays configured with solid-state drives (SSDs), and product enhancements that improve staff productivity and business continuity. Dell Storage Center Operating System 7 (SCOS 7), the latest version of the SC microcode, is providing similar functional enhancements to the Dell Compellent installed base; of particular note is SCOS 7’s support of Live Volume and compression and deduplication across SSD and hard-disk drive (HDD) tiers of storage.

Fujitsu’s high-level direction is to provide a solution and service business, rather than specific point products. Nevertheless, Fujitsu also resells the NetApp FAS and AFF series arrays, in situations when a customer requires a large file-storage-oriented solution. Due to this, the Fujitsu marketing and sales emphasis is not solely on products, but also on the wider IT solution, and therefore customers are not as aware of Fujitsu storage array marketing programs as they are with product-oriented competitors. Taking this into account, Fujitsu offers the Eternus DX S3 series of storage arrays, which consists of the midrange DX500 and DX600, and the high-end DX8700 and DX8900 models. The DX500 S3 and DX600 S3 have not been upgraded since November 2013. Fujitsu recently made available the highly competitive AF250 and AF650 SSAs in November 2016, which use the same administration GUI and can be used to cluster and replicate data from and to disk arrays. While Fujitsu’s long-term direction is toward SSAs, the vendor also enables the integration of the Eternus DX into OpenStack environments by providing the OpenStack integration Cinder driver/software for Eternus DX storage. Fujitsu has provided customers with transparency for the performance and pricing of its storage arrays, and continues to do so with a published SPC-2 benchmark that became available in May 2016.

Hitachi Vantara (formerly known as Hitachi Data Systems [HDS]) is a company in transition. Changes in senior management and business strategies, reductions in workforce, and Hitachi’s decision to focus Hitachi Vantara on IoT opportunities within its installed base suggest that storage marketing and sales resources will continue to be constrained for the foreseeable future. Hence, we expect Hitachi to continue to rely on its reputation for building reliable high-performance storage arrays, its customer base and its partners to support its storage business. While this is suboptimal from a storage growth perspective, this strategy does have the advantage of using the vendor’s large global customer base and its well-respected worldwide support organization to maximum effect.

Hitachi has kept its Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) and Hitachi Network Attached Storage (HNAS) gateway offerings competitive by most measures of product attractiveness, particularly those that are important to business and mission-critical workloads. Sharing a common architecture and management tools from the smallest VSP G200 to the flagship VSP G1500 preserves customer investments in and policies and procedures, and leverages ecosystem-related investments. Hitachi-engineered Flash Modules (FMDs) are now available within all VSP G series systems. FMDs provide wire speed in-line data compression without consuming controller resources by offloading data compression overhead into a custom application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC). Data deduplication is restricted to Flash (FMD and SSD) layer with block workloads and across all tiers of storage with file workloads using the integrated NAS modules or HNAS gateways. Other product enhancements have focused on improving ease of use, developing tighter integration with VMware, developing a hybrid cloud solution and increasing the distance of the Global-Active Device (GAD) offering to 500 km.

The Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) storage array portfolio consists of the XP7, 3PAR StoreServ, StoreVirtual and HPE Nimble Storage CS-Series arrays. The CS-Series of midrange arrays was added to the HPE portfolio with its acquisition of Nimble Storage in April 2017. Nimble Storage sales, marketing and operations have been fully merged into centralized HPE corporate functions. Nimble R&D and support operate as a group and report to a Nimble team within the storage business. The Nimble CS-Series is clearly positioned to complement, not replace, the HPE 3PAR StoreServ series. Nimble’s InfoSight will also enhance HPE’s service and support effectiveness by improving remote support, analysis and predictive monitoring. Differentiation in arrays is primarily in architecture, scale, ease of use, and breadth of protocol and server support. Therefore, for the most common and standard use cases, such as server virtualization, all of the arrays in the HPE storage portfolio can be successfully implemented. The HPE 3PAR StoreServ series of arrays was recently enhanced with the 20000 R2 series, which became available in June 2017. The HPE XP7, which is sourced from Hitachi Ltd., Japan, is sold into very specific point solutions where niche protocol connects are required and, therefore, HPE rarely leads with the HPE XP7. Instead, it leads with the 3PAR StoreServ and Nimble CS-Series arrays for the majority of customer requirements.

Huawei is a large and growing provider of a broad range of hardware and software technology products. With a global reach, Huawei is leveraging its strong standing as a network equipment provider to the telecommunications industry to sell its enterprise IT products, servers and storage. With a late start, the vendor has emerged as a disruptive provider of general-purpose storage arrays, gaining share from the entrenched legacy vendors. Featuring a scale-out architecture, its OceanStor 5000 V3, 6000 V3 and 18000 V3 platforms cover a broad range of use cases in the midrange and high-end general-purpose storage array and NAS market. The OceanStor offerings have the performance and capacity scale, along with a strong set of controller-based data services, to meet most users’ requirements. Since early 2016, Huawei has been strengthening its OceanStor controller-based software support for OpenStack, the public cloud and deployments requiring robust high availability. Huawei strategically engages with a broad range of value-added resellers, distributors, system integrators and cloud service providers to reach the end-user market.

IBM’s general-purpose storage portfolio mainly consists of the Storwize family, DS8000 series and the XIV series. While IBM continues to make incremental investments in the Storwize and DS8000 series, and positions these products aggressively, the cadence of XIV series product enhancements has slowed in the past year. IBM released the V7000 Gen 2+ and all flash variants, namely V5030F and V7000F, in August 2016. The V7000 Gen 2+ was released with Intel 10-core Broadwell processors and increased memory, and 16GB FC interfaces. The V7000 Gen 2+ can coexist with earlier versions of the V7000 in a single cluster. IBM also continues to release new versions of its SDS product, Spectrum Virtualize, at a regular cadence to minimize potential microcode interoperability problems. Enhancements to the DS8000 series include support for space reclamation and tiering to cloud-based object storage platforms. Tiering to cloud does not require an additional gateway device and can be used to archive aging datasets.

All three platforms — Storwize, DS8000 series and XIV Storage System — can be used as building blocks in VersaStack, IBM’s integrated systems product.

Infinidat, founded in 2011, is a privately held company reporting positive cash flow and profitability of InfiniBox series sales into the high end of the storage array market. InfiniBox differentiation centers on high availability, consistent high performance, autonomic operation, multiprotocol support, and much lower acquisition and ownership costs than competitors’ high-end arrays. InfiniBox v.3 microcode, released in September 2016, includes in-line data compression, iSCSI and NAS protocol support, and improved performance analytics. Its optional data compression has a minimal impact on performance because data is only compressed when it is destaged from second-level cache (i.e., SSDs) to back-end HDDs.

InfiniBox has an intuitive web GUI and an architecture that takes ownership of data placement and reduces the skills needed to own and make effective use of InfiniBox F2000, F4000 and F6000 series storage arrays. InfiniBox’s automation capabilities are further enhanced by the availability of software development kits (SDKs) and support of nonblocking RESTful APIs. InfiniBox’s use of three active controllers per system provides lots of compute power to reduce the impact of microcode updates and controller failures, and enables the ongoing development of new functionality that consumes CPU resources. Overall sales effectiveness is further enhanced by an all-inclusive capacity-based software pricing model, standard three-year 24/7 support and the waiving of installation fees.

Infortrend is a small, but established provider of a broad range of general-purpose storage arrays. With attention to detail and a steady cadence of R&D innovation, Infortrend has been developing and shipping entry-level to midrange general-purpose storage arrays for over two decades. Noted for being an early adopter of latest-generation HDDs and SSDs, as well as the latest Intel CPU sets, Infortrend’s products generally deliver above average price/performance. Infortrend’s midsize general-purpose storage systems have evolved over time from platforms that supported only block-access protocols to platforms that support multiple protocols, including block-, file- and object-access services. The EonStor GSe Series and GS Series include an integrated Cloud Gateway Engine that supports backup and archiving functions to Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Alibaba Aliyun. With market success in the Asia/Pacific region, Japan and EMEA markets, Infortrend exclusively reaches the end-user market via its channel partners.

Inspur is a China-based information and communication technology (ICT) vendor that is well-known for its leadership in the server market, primarily targeted at cloud service providers. With a strong presence in the hyperscale market, Inspur has expanded into the global market and made inroads in the service provider segment. However, it also has a comprehensive portfolio of entry-level, midrange and high-end storage, as well as SDS products. Inspur positions the AS5000G2 series as the midrange storage product, and targets the AS18000 at the high-end market. The AS18000 supports both iSCSI and FC block protocols, but does not support file protocols. Data services, namely snapshots, cloning, encryption, local mirroring and QoS, are bundled as part of the base license. Additional services, such as remote replication, virtualization and tiering, require separate licenses. Licenses are priced per system for the midrange systems and priced per controller pair for the high-end systems. Inspur sells a majority of its products directly, and has very few channel partners outside the Asia/Pacific region and Japan.

Rather than applying R&D resources to acquire or develop an enterprise storage stack, Lenovo has opted to partner with other technology providers to establish a presence in the enterprise storage array market and to complement its server offerings. Lenovo offers two Lenovo branded product families that span the entry-level to midrange enterprise storage array market — the DS Series and the V Series. Lenovo sources the DS Series from a third party under an OEM arrangement, selling it under the new ThinkSystem DS Series brand. The ThinkSystem is an umbrella brand covering Lenovo servers, storage and networking products. It sources the V Series from IBM under an OEM arrangement, selling it under the established Lenovo Storage V Series brand. Emphasizing leading-edge price/performance attributes, the DS6200 offers a basic set of data service features and limited scalability. The more full-featured V5030 offers more than twice the scalability of the DS Series, as well as a richer set of data service software.

NEC is an established Japan-based technology and service provider. In the last two years, NEC has made efforts to increase its brand awareness in the U.S., and is working with channel partners to expand its reach in this market. Over the past year, NEC has made several updates to its flagship storage product line, the Mx10 Series. NEC entered the SSA market with the release of the Mx10-F Series. It has established key technology partnerships with Commvault, Veritas Technologies’ NetBackup and Veeam for backup, and Milestone Systems for video surveillance solutions. From security and compliance standpoints, it supports audit trails, role-based access control (RBAC) capabilities and integration with third-party antivirus scanning engines such as Trend Micro ServerProtect for Microsoft Windows, McAfee VirusScan Enterprise and Symantec Protection Engine. NEC is an active contributor to OpenStack and has regularly released OpenStack Cinder drivers for FC and iSCSI in the last year. It also provides verifiable and independent performance benchmarks by publishing SPC-1 benchmarks. Software licensing for the Mx10 Series is controller-based and does not depend on the capacity of the storage procured.

NetApp is leading its array value proposition with the Data Fabric architecture, which is designed to improve agility and enable customers to exploit the hybrid cloud. To enable this from a storage array perspective, NetApp has positioned its FAS series as general-purpose storage and its E-series as storage building blocks for use with single-application workloads such as video surveillance, technical computing, and backup and recovery, and 100Gb NVMe-over-InfiniBand for HPC workloads. The FAS8200 and FAS9000, which were made available in October 2016 and November 2016, respectively, and the E5760 and E5724, featuring the new SANtricity 11.40 OS, were released in September 2017. NetApp made the Ontap 9.2 version of array software available for the FAS arrays to provide additional data fabric features and capabilities that integrate with cloud services and provide common data management across storage arrays, cloud storage, SDS and hyperconverged solutions. While the value proposition of data management rather than storage management resonates well with customers, it is very complex to implement and support in a heterogeneous storage vendor environment; therefore, most customers’ successes will be in a homogeneous NetApp infrastructure. Ontap software is now available as stand-alone SDS software that customers can implement on servers in the cloud (AWS and Microsoft Azure) and on industry-standard servers for remote offices and converged systems.

The Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance is a technologically mature, general-purpose enterprise storage array platform. The ZFS Storage Appliance’s underlying in-memory architecture produces high input/output operations per second (IOPS) performance and low latency, and comes with a rich set of data services. The ZFS Storage Appliance Analytics software, DTrace, provides users with fine-grained visibility into the elements of a ZFS infrastructure, as well as into Oracle Database 12c pluggable databases and virtual machines (VMs) in server virtualization environments, helping to optimize performance and capacity, and troubleshoot issues affecting business applications. Building on the ZFS Storage Appliance core architecture and data service platform, Oracle has implemented specific features to enhance integration, ease of use and performance with Oracle applications and databases. To further support its cloud initiative, the vendor has added a built-in cloud gateway to the ZFS Storage Appliance, enabling users to seamlessly place and retrieve data on the Oracle Public Cloud platform.

Promise Technology has a portfolio of storage arrays and solutions primarily positioned to address opportunities in media and entertainment, rich media, video streaming, file sync and share, postproduction, video surveillance, and backup and archiving. However, only the Promise VTrak E5000, VTrak Ex30 RAID and VTrak A-Class Shared SAN storage appliance offerings qualify as general-purpose storage arrays. With design emphasis on performance associated with large blocks and ease of use, the VTrak E5000 and VTrak Ex30 RAID platforms are basic storage arrays that support a SAN or direct-attached storage (DAS) infrastructure. Conforming to a scale-out architecture, the VTrak A-Class platform incorporates a high-bandwidth and low-latency file system, VTrakFS, to support file sharing applications. With a global presence, Promise has advanced research centers, sales, marketing and service/support personnel located in the U.S., China and its home country, Taiwan. Promise reaches the end-user community via a wide array of reseller and OEM partners.

Quantum’s storage portfolio consists of the QXS hybrid storage system, namely QXS-3 series, QXS-4 series and QXS-6 series products that are targeted at general-purpose workloads as well as vertical-specific use cases. The QXS system also supports data services such as tiering, snapshots, local mirroring and replication capabilities, but lacks data reduction technologies such as compression and deduplication. The QXS Q-Tools provide storage management capabilities such as caching and thin provisioning. QXS supports a broad range of hypervisors and integrates with open-source software platforms such as OpenStack.

Quantum sells all of its storage systems via channel partnerships. Postsales support is addressed by support staff stationed in multiple geographies that mostly address Level 1 and Level 2 cases, while Level 3 issues are addressed by dedicated engineering teams located in Quantum’s headquarters. In the past few years, Quantum has increasingly focused on delivering vertical-specific solutions. It has established partnerships with video surveillance software providers and media and content production vendors, and has delivered solutions that address these specific use cases.

Taiwan-based storage vendor Synology primarily sells NAS solutions to the midmarket segment. Although the Synology XS+/XS series is mainly deployed for file storage, the same platform can also be used to host the vendor’s proprietary email server, sync and share server, backup server, and a video surveillance system, each of which can be enabled by downloading separate software plug-ins. The platform also supports iSCSI, thereby providing small or midsize businesses with a low-cost optimized option for traditional SAN storage. Synology offers its customers the flexibility to choose the hard drive type and capacity for each of its storage products and does not bundle its HDDs with the storage array models. Its products are certified with a wide variety of virtualization and cloud platforms, such as VMware, Microsoft, Docker and OpenStack, as well all major public cloud vendors. All essential data services, such as compression, snapshots and replication, and file and block protocol support, are bundled as part of the base software, which is free of charge. Synology has a rich ecosystem of channel partners to address all major markets, and technical support staff cover all major geographies.

Tegile is a vendor that often leads in the ability to implement and offer new storage technologies, purchase methods, guarantees and features. In August 2017, Western Digital announced that it would acquire Tegile, which would lead to more financial, technology and go-to-market resources; however, organizational integration plans are not available and, therefore, the success of this acquisition and completion of this acquisition cannot yet be determined. Tegile is now working on adding a new tier of persistent storage memory in the controller for hybrid storage arrays to improve performance while maintaining low hybrid storage array purchase costs. Due to the storage software being media-independent with no proprietary hardware, Tegile offers unified storage arrays with most protocols and storage media, and can transition to new technologies quickly. Support is provided globally in the Asia/Pacific region, EMEA and the U.S. Tegile’s use of an indirect channel sales model is intended to lower costs thereby enabling customers to buy on-premises private data center storage at public cloud cost. Tegile continues to grow and gain new customers within the hybrid storage array market, but sales of its SSAs are overtaking the HDD-based hybrid arrays. However, since Tegile uses the same storage software in hybrid arrays and SSAs, the hybrid arrays and SSAs have the same administrative GUI and can replicate to each other, and customer migrations from and to SSAs and hybrid arrays are simple.

After growing its installed base to over 1,400 customers and 4,300 systems, Tintri became a publicly traded company in June 2017. The money raised by this IPO will be invested in marketing, sales and R&D. The Tintri T800 Series of fully autonomous hybrid storage arrays is targeted at customers that do not want to manage or administer their storage arrays or are considering HCIS solutions. Tintri’s decision to provision only VMs, rather than physical and VMs, has enabled it to deliver ease of use that is very competitive with HCIS solutions, and more prescriptive in tailoring performance to individual VM needs. The arrays only require monitoring, not storage provisioning or configuration. All Tintri arrays provide in-line compression and deduplication across all tiers of storage. This is especially valuable in VDI and dev/test environments.

Tintri Global Center (TGC) Standard is a no-charge management tool that can manage up to 64 systems from a single management console. Features such as VM-based policy management, QoS automation, and systemwide real-time storage and server analytics provide the ability to manage and meet service levels, even as systemwide server and storage performance change. TGC Advanced with VM Scale-out software is an extra chargeable item that creates a federated pool of storage that can scale up to 40 PBs and 480,000 VMs with accelerated storage live migration through array offloading. Analytics and modeling provide recommendations to storage administrators that minimize the cost of meeting service-level objectives. Tintri Cloud Connector allows workloads to be protected in Amazon S3 or IBM Cloud Object Storage, in addition to Tintri replication and snapshots.