First up, Tegile was acquired by Western Digital (WDC). This is in part due to WDC’s desire to be a one stop shop vertically integrated supplier for storage parts, systems, etc. This is how all of the storage parts OEMs needed to move, though Seagate failed to execute this correctly, selling off their array business in part to Cray. Toshiba … well … they have some existential challenges right now, and are about to sell off their profitable flash and memory systems business, if they can just get everyone to agree … This comes from the fact that spinning disk, while a venerable technology, has been effectively completely commoditized.

Information at this link. It is being called a “strategic transaction”, though it likely came about vis-a-vis Seagate doing some profound and deep thinking over what business it was in. Seagate has been weathering a storm, and has been working on re-orgs to deal with a declining disk market. They acquired ClusterStor as part of a preceding transaction of Xyratex. Xyratex was the basis for the Cray storage platforms (post Enginio).

I’ve been trying to help Scalable Informatics customers understand these market realities for a while. Unfortunately, to my discredit, I’ve not been very successful at doing so … and many groups seem to assume supply is plentiful and cheap across all storage modalities. Not true. And not likely true for at least the rest of the year, if not longer. This article goes into some depth that I’ve tried to explain to others in phone conversations, private email threads.

Time and time again, the day job had been asked to discuss how the solutions are differentiated. Time and time again, we showed benchmarks on real workloads that show significant performance deltas. Not 2 or 3 sigma measurements. More often than not, 2x -> 10x better. Yet … yet … we were asked, again and again, how we did it. We pointed to our architecture. But, they complained, isn’t it the same as X (insert your favorite volume vendor here)?

Two items of note here. First, Cavium acquires qlogic. This is interesting at some levels, as qlogic has been a long time player in storage (and networking). There are many qlogic FC switches out there, as well as some older Infiniband gear (pre-Intel sale). Cavium is more of a processor shop, having built a number of interesting SoC and general purpose CPUs. I am not sure the combo is going to be a serious contender to Intel or others in the data center space, but I think they will be working on carving out a specific niche.

Saw this in a post on VentureBeat. Intel Capital has been an important player in the space for a while. What happens next to them is worth paying attention to. They’ve been in the thick of many interesting companies, though usually outside of Intel’s core foci. Somewhat beyond the normal corporate strategic VC roles. This could change a number of things for startups … new and existing. VCs have been sitting on the sidelines, or being less active over the recent past, and this is likely not to help the situation.

This one has been in the rumor mill for a while. NetApp has been needing something to play well in the all flash array space, and it now has something. This said, the array space is very much on the decline certainly with respect to dumb JBODs and smart “filer heads”. That design is being retired in favor of smarter and hyperconverged systems. Such as Unison with Ceph, Forte, and related HCI (hyper converged infrastructure) systems.

This is huge. Now Seagate has a relationship with Micron, Toshiba has its own disks and shares a fab with SanDisk (though I think with this acquisition, that will rapidly change). Ok … so the HD vendors are busy snapping up the Flash makers. Is Micron next? Rumors of something have been swirling for a while. Note also, SanDisk has their InfiniFlash unit. WD simply did not have storage appliances. This gets them into that space, and directly competing with the likes of all the smaller startup all flash array (AFA) vendors.

Need to think how this will play out. The Register’s take is here. It seems that this will solve the “shareholder value” problem indicated by Elliot Management (e.g. they wanted more return on their investment). As part of the increasing the return and value return to shareholders, EMC had been in a cost cutting mode. Layoffs have been in process, and likely products trimmed or refocused. Once this goes through (assuming regulators won’t protest), Dell will have

Story is here. Not sure this is a great tie up … EMC has lots of things Dell doesn’t need (and vice versa). Possibly parts of EMC (secession from the federation?) with Dell. I can’t imagine VMware wanting to tie up with one vendor. Nor Pivotal, etc. This said, Cisco pulled out of the venture with EMC to pursue its own directions, competitive with elements. But then they bought and subsequently closed Whiptail.

The Register reports this morning, that Seagate has acquired DotHill. DotHill makes arrays and their kit is resold and rebadged by many. In general the array market (high end) is in a decline, and doesn’t show signs of turning around (ever). The low and mid market, including some of the cloud bits is growing. I am not sure about the OCP stuff, but the low end bits are where we are seeing 4, 8, and 12 drive arrays show up as completely commoditized gear.

Article is here, take it as a rumor until we hear from them. My comments: First, M&A; is hard. You need a good fit product wise (little overlap and great complementary functions/capabilities), and a culture/people fit matter. Second, sales teams need to be on-board selling complete solutions involving the acquired tech. Sometimes this doesn’t happen, for any number of reasons, some fixable, some not. Third, Cisco is out of the storage game if this is true.

Terascala appears to have been disassembled, with much of the team going to Cray. Terascala started out selling internally developed storage appliances for Lustre. They developed deployment, monitoring, and management tools. Their UI was reasonably good. Then they struck up a deal with Dell and a few others. In doing so, they largely stopped their appliance sales. Put their code upon their partners hardware. This did generate more force multipliers for them in sales, but it cost them some of their differentiation … unless their boxes were entirely undifferentiated, where it would reduce their overall costs to avoid selling undifferentiated hardware.

I was heads down all day yesterday working on a few things. Apparently this is widely known now, but I saw it late last night. Micron is being pursued by a group affiliated with Tsinghua University. There is a political angle to this group, as they are connected to the government through their management. Why is this interesting (the acquisition potential that is). Well, there are 4 basic Flash fabs out there these days.

[update] TL;DR this appears to be rumor/speculation. One would think that such an acquisition would be prominent on Nutanix’s web site. Its April fools, in May. /sigh Huge in the hyperconverged space (which, not so curiously, is where the day job is), and its setting up the battle lines between the major software/hardware players. Cisco was already number 5 hardware vendor, and was bragging about “beating the white boxes”. The last may be more wishful thinking than reality.