Overview The storage market is competitively mature from a price and functionality perspective. With marketing programs and product differentiation being the most significant battleground. However, technological developments such as solid state/flash improvements create disruption from a performance and infrastructure perspective. Vendors are challenged to differentiate their products and to position storage offerings to compete with storage cloud subscription costs. Therefore, storage array vendors offer repackaged decades old software defined storage products and subscription pricing models. Nevertheless, many customers still prefer to have in-house data centres for security and cost transparency requirements when cloud infrastructure accountability, legal data protection requirements cannot