Primary Storage Insights

Primary storage market will continue to grow at a favorable rate in the following years, although there are continuous competitions from server storage as well as public cloud. Slower growth rate (even negative growth rate) may occur in certain categories in primary storage products. It reflects adoptions of new data center strategies and new workload introductions such as AI/Machine Learning, big data and other workloads powered by 5G and other emerging technologies.

To continuously generate growth, fend off fierce competition from public clouds and server storage and provide more values to customers, primary storage vendors shall focus on several initiatives. Of all the initiatives, one of the key initiatives potentially could be data/application platform integration.

Primary storage market is becoming a red ocean market with increasingly competitions from cloud and among existing vendors. Profits and growth are slowing down. Storage vendors need to expand market space with new value creation. In today and future market, data and application has far more reaching impacts to customer’s business than underlying infrastructure. Application and data platform has controlled data access point resulting in decoupling of infrastructure underlying and applications that use them. Building an integrated application platform by leveraging hardware and underlying infrastructure capabilities could be one of the key competences for primary storage products. Application platform shall leverage hardware and enterprise capabilities provided by primary storage to offer differentiation among other vendors with full stack optimization.

With popularity of data mesh methodology, more and more enterprises have decentralized their data, pushing data storage, models, and management into different business units. [1] Whoever controls data entry point will control entire customer data set and therefore, treat underlying infrastructure just as resources from edge, data center and cloud. How does primary storage vendor become major contributor to this effort instead of bystander? It will be the key for the next few years to define the role primary storage is going to play in the data center.

Vendors may often tout their hardware prowess to differentiate themselves from their competitors. Software or platform capabilities, so called “Soft Power”, that could also distance vendor from their competitors. A start-up company may rely on “back technology” to differentiate itself from competitors and incumbents. Growing software capabilities and broader ecosystem supports to meet customer requirements with hardware differentiation as core competence can increase customer stickiness and expand business. They are the driving forces for business grow. It is especially true for sectors that are much mature, for example storage industry.

We expect green initiative and carbon emission conscious data center solution will be more important going forward. Countries are implementing more and more related regulations that have bigger impact on enterprises. Carbon emission

regulation conforming may become a barrier for enterprises to enter certain IT markets in the future.

Some primary storage vendors, NetApp® as leading example, have started to transition themselves into public cloud storage companies. It is a bold move. To hedge the risk, we are expecting those vendors will continue to invest their bread and butter – on prem primary storage market.